The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) regularly participates in military training exercises. The ICRC’s participation includes working with militaries to ensure military members involved in detainee management are appropriately trained on practices and procedures that result in detainees being treated with dignity and respect.
Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025 offered ACMC the opportunity to host delegates from the ICRC to visit the ADF’s exercise detention facility to observe a range of scenarios, including the detention of prisoners of war. Under the Law of Armed Conflict, ICRC has the right to undertake humanitarian visits to prisoners of war and civilian internees during armed conflict.
ICRC’s visit to the facility at Shoalwater Bay Training Area in Queensland, established for the exercise, aimed to analyse possible operational and humanitarian issues that armed forces are likely to encounter when managing prisoners of war in armed conflict. The ICRC visit reinforced the protections that IHL provides to detainees and what armed forces can do to ensure humane treatment.
As part of the exercise, the ICRC delegation was granted unrestricted access to the facility and primary interrogation centre and conducted private interviews with ‘prisoners of war’ and reviewed the facility’s records.
Talisman Sabre 2025 is the largest and most sophisticated iteration of the warfighting exercise. From 13 July to 4 August, more than 40,000 military personnel from 19 nations will directly participate in Talisman Sabre across multiple locations in Australia and overseas in Papua New Guinea.
