I didn't expect a training on International Humanitarian Law to leave me thinking about a records office. But that's exactly what happened. Towards the end of the training activity the topic of National Information Bureau — the NIB — was discussed and I found myself scribbling notes long after the slide had moved on.
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At first it sounded like paperwork. Filing. Administration. The kind of mechanism you nod along to and forget by lunch.
Then it hit me: this isn't about records at all. It's about making sure that when armed conflict tears through people's lives, they don't simply vanish from the system — and that somewhere, a family isn't left staring at a phone that never rings, not knowing if the person they love is alive.
That's when the training stopped being theoretical for me. I started asking a much more practical question: should the Philippines actually build and operate a National Information Bureau as part of how we prepare for IHL obligations?
I think it's a question worth taking seriously. Here's why.
An IHL mechanism with a human face
The Third Geneva Convention of 1949 requires every party to an international armed conflict to set up an official Information Bureau for prisoners of war. Its job, in plain terms, is to gather information about POWs and feed it into the humanitarian information system that runs through the International Committee of the Red Cross — eventually linking national authorities, the ICRC's Central Tracing Agency, and the families waiting for word.
That description sounds bureaucratic. But sit with it for a second, and it isn't.
A name in a database might be a soldier who's just been captured. A death notification might be someone's father, or mother, or child. A simple transfer record might be the only proof a family gets that their relative is still alive.
Information, in this context, is a form of protection. When war pulls people away from their families, the state needs some way of answering one question: what happened to this person? Everything else is detail.
Why think about this in peacetime?
One thing the training made clear to me: you can't wait for a war to start before you build the systems you'll need during it.
If an international armed conflict broke out tomorrow, our institutions would be hit all at once — casualties, prisoners, missing persons, displaced families, broken infrastructure, overloaded communication lines, a hundred competing emergencies. That is exactly the wrong moment to be figuring out who's in charge of tracking prisoners of war.
Peacetime is when we get to work that out calmly. Who takes on the NIB role? What's its legal mandate? Which agencies feed it information, and how do we verify what comes in? How do we keep records secure, pass information to the ICRC, and log transfers, releases, repatriations, and deaths? How does it all connect back to military and civilian authorities?
In short: peacetime is when we build the machinery that the law may one day require us to run under pressure.
Where the Inter-Agency Committee on IHL comes in
This is where I think the national Inter-Agency Committee on IHL (IAC-IHL) has a real opening. Instead of waiting for a conflict to force the issue, the Committee could treat the NIB as one piece of a broader national preparedness effort — starting not with a new bureaucracy, but with an honest assessment.
Do we already have some of these functions scattered across government? Which agency has the mandate and the capacity to take this on? What information systems already exist, and where are the gaps? How would information actually move — from the Armed Forces and other authorities, into a national mechanism, and out to the ICRC?
Answering those questions first would tell us what kind of NIB actually fits the Philippines.
No single office can do this alone
The NIB can't function as some isolated desk quietly filing paperwork. Information about people affected by conflict is scattered across the Armed Forces, detention authorities, hospitals, law enforcement, civil registries, and foreign affairs. Each holds a piece of the puzzle needed to identify where someone is and what happened to them.
That's why this has to be an inter-agency effort by design. I'd picture it working something like this: the IAC-IHL sets policy direction, a designated NIB serves as the operational hub, and participating agencies stay responsible for feeding in and updating the information under their own mandates. The ICRC remains a key humanitarian partner throughout, particularly through the international tracing system.
More than a compliance checkbox
It would be easy to frame this as just another Geneva Convention requirement to tick off. I don't think that does it justice.
Picture a family whose son was deployed when conflict broke out. Weeks pass. No word. They don't know if he's alive, wounded, captured, or missing. In that silence, a working information system can change everything — it might confirm he's alive and held as a prisoner of war, or it might, painfully, confirm his death.
Neither outcome is easy to hear. But not knowing is its own kind of wound. A functioning NIB can't erase the pain of war, but it can stop people from simply disappearing into it.
It's about the missing, too
This matters even more once you think about missing persons as a whole. War creates chaos in the most literal sense — communications break down, units get separated, people are captured or evacuated, bodies go unidentified, records fall apart.
A properly built information mechanism won't solve the problem of missing persons on its own. But it becomes a crucial thread in the larger fabric — national and international — that's trying to account for people caught up in armed conflict.
A possible roadmap
Based on what I took away from the training, here's a five-step starting point I'd propose to the IAC-IHL:
- Assess the legal and institutional landscape. Look at what the Geneva Conventions actually require, and map that against what the Philippines already has in place for prisoners of war, protected persons, and missing persons.
- Map existing capacity. Find the agencies, databases, and people already doing pieces of this work.
- Design the institutional model. Decide which agency — or which arrangement across agencies — should serve as the NIB, and define its mandate, authority, staffing, and reporting lines.
- Build information-sharing protocols. Standardize how information gets collected, verified, protected, updated, and passed along, including coordination with the ICRC.
- Run simulation exercises. Don't let an actual war be the first stress test. Tabletop exercises can surface the gaps while there's still time to fix them.
Turning training into institutional action
Trainings are only as valuable as what comes after them. Knowledge that stays in a notebook doesn't protect anyone.
For me, the NIB was the takeaway that stuck. It's a reminder that IHL isn't just a set of rules we study after the fact — it's a framework that depends on institutions that are already built, staff who are already trained, and systems that already work before the worst happens.
Establishing an NIB wouldn't just be a legal formality. It would be a real, visible sign that the Philippines takes preparedness seriously — not only preparing to fight, but preparing to protect people once fighting starts.
The NIB and non-international armed conflict: why preparedness shouldn't stop at the IAC
There's another piece of this I keep coming back to: the NIB shouldn't only matter to us in the context of an international armed conflict.
For the Philippines, that's not an abstract point. Our history includes internal armed conflicts, and the human toll there has been just as real — people killed, wounded, detained, displaced, separated from their families, or simply gone.
So here's the harder question: even though the Geneva Convention's formal NIB requirement is written for international armed conflict, should we also have a mechanism that does similar humanitarian work during a non-international armed conflict? I think that deserves serious thought too.
The legal distinction is real — but it shouldn't be the whole story
IHL does draw a line between international and non-international armed conflict. The Third Geneva Convention's Information Bureau is built specifically for POWs in an IAC. In a NIAC, "prisoner of war" isn't a legal category in the same way — instead, Common Article 3 sets the baseline protections for people not taking part in hostilities, and Additional Protocol II adds further protection where it applies.
So no, we can't just copy-paste the IAC prisoner-of-war framework onto a NIAC. That would be legally sloppy.
But the underlying human need doesn't care about that distinction. People still need to be accounted for. Families still need answers. The missing still need to be traced.
The need doesn't disappear just because the conflict is "internal"
Think about a family whose relative is caught up in a long-running internal conflict. That person might have been killed in fighting, wounded and taken to a hospital, detained by government forces, held by an armed group, separated from the people they were with, displaced from their home, or simply reported missing.
For that family, the question is exactly the same one I mentioned earlier: what happened to my loved one? Whether a lawyer would classify the conflict as international or non-international makes no difference to them. That's why I think the NIB deserves to be seen not just as a wartime treaty obligation, but as part of a much broader national architecture for humanitarian information.
What a broader NIB role could look like
To be clear, I'm not suggesting the Philippine NIB should reach for powers IHL never gave it. What I am suggesting is that the IAC-IHL explores whether the NIB — or something that works alongside it — could help collect, consolidate, and pass along humanitarian information about people affected by conflict, always within the bounds of IHL, domestic law, data protection standards, and each agency's existing mandate.
That could cover missing persons, people detained in connection with the conflict, people separated from their families, unidentified deceased individuals, people transferred between places of detention or care, and other categories where humanitarian information genuinely matters.
To be very clear about what this is not: it's not a proposal for a sweeping surveillance database. It's the opposite. The goal is to keep people from becoming invisible — nothing more, nothing less.
NIAC makes inter-agency coordination even more important, not less
In an internal conflict, information tends to be even more scattered. The Armed Forces, the Philippine National Police, local government units, hospitals, detention facilities, and humanitarian organizations may each be holding a different fragment of the picture — and there are genuinely difficult questions around information tied to non-state armed groups.
That's exactly why coordination matters so much here. A national information mechanism could give us clear answers to practical questions: Who collects the information? Who verifies it? Who's authorized to access it? How is it protected? How does it move through the right humanitarian channels? And critically — how do families actually go about asking?
Those are questions we want answered before a crisis, not in the middle of one.
The ICRC's role stays central
The ICRC's experience here is hard to overstate — decades of work on missing persons, restoring family links, and protecting people in both international and internal conflicts. For me, that underlines something important: any Philippine information mechanism has to be built with real humanitarian neutrality, confidentiality, and data protection at its core.
The NIB can never become an intelligence-gathering tool. Its value depends entirely on keeping a clear line between information gathered for humanitarian protection and information gathered for military or security purposes. That line is what makes people trust it enough to use it.
A "no one left unaccounted for" mechanism
All of this points me toward a bigger way of thinking about the NIB — not as something that only switches on when an international armed conflict begins, but as part of a broader national commitment to a simple idea: no one affected by armed conflict should just disappear without anyone trying to find out what happened to them.
That principle holds whether the conflict is international or internal, even if the legal mechanics differ. Seen that way, the NIB becomes part of a wider national framework for accountability, tracing, and humanitarian information.
An opening for the Inter-Agency Committee on IHL
I think this gives the Committee a chance to aim higher than minimum compliance, by working through two questions together: how do we establish the NIB that IHL requires for an international armed conflict, and how does our broader national tracing and information capacity hold up under the realities of a non-international armed conflict?
Studied side by side, those questions could lead to something that's legally sound, practically workable, and actually responsive to what Filipino communities affected by conflict have experienced.
Bringing it back to the Philippine context
If there's one thing the training left me with, it's this: the value of IHL isn't just in knowing what the text says — it's in asking how it actually protects people here, in our own context.
The NIB is a good test case for that. The treaty gives us a starting point, but our preparedness has to be shaped by the conflicts Filipinos have actually lived through. If someone goes missing, their family shouldn't have to navigate a maze of disconnected offices just to get an answer. If someone is detained, there should be a way to account for where they are. If someone dies, there should be a system that documents it and, where possible, tells the family. And if someone stays missing, there should be an institution still committed to finding out why.
The Proposal
So here's what I'd put forward: that the national IAC-IHL take up the NIB as part of a larger initiative on IHL information, tracing, and accountability — one that looks at both our obligations in an international armed conflict and our humanitarian preparedness for internal ones.
That way we can hold the legal distinction and the humanitarian imperative at the same time, without losing sight of either. The legal regimes differ. What people need doesn't.
For me, that's what the NIB really represents. It's not just a bureau. It's a commitment that even in the chaos and violence of armed conflict, people stay identifiable, families stay connected to information, and no one who goes missing is simply written off.
A modest proposal, a significant purpose
My hope is that the IAC-IHL takes the first step — even a modest one. An inter-agency technical working group discussion. A legal and institutional assessment. A mapping of what we already have. Small beginnings, but ones that could grow into something with real humanitarian weight.
Because in the end, the NIB was never really about information. It's about accountability. It's about making sure a prisoner of war isn't just a name lost somewhere in the fog of war. It's about making sure a family doesn't spend years wondering. And it's about the state continuing to see, record, protect, and account for the human being behind every name — even when everything else is falling apart.
That, to me, is one of the most meaningful lessons from this training: humanitarian protection doesn't start with rules alone. It starts with institutions capable of actually putting those rules into practice.
AI assistance (ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude ) was used to help draft and organize this blog post; the author takes full responsibility for the final content.
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