By the 1980s, the 1954 Hague Convention was suffering from ‘benign neglect’. Underwhelming participation in it and the High Contracting Parties' lacklustre response to calls for their implementation reports reflected a loss of interest in the instrument. Nor was this hard to explain: among other things, its regimes of special protection and international control were failures, its provisions on attack had been eclipsed by those of the 1977 Additional Protocols, as had the sanctions prescribed for its breach, and the lack of a prohibition on unauthorised archaeological excavations by an Occupying Power had been exposed as a serious omission.

With the outbreak in 1980 of the Iran–Iraq War, which wrought considerable destruction on the cultural heritage of Iran, the Convention and its inadequacies were thrust into the spotlight. In 1983, the Director-General of UNESCO convened a meeting of legal experts to discuss it. In 1987, Iran asked the Director-General to include on the agenda of the twenty-fourth session of the General Conference an item entitled ‘The role played by UNESCO in ensuring the application and implementation of the provisions of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property, the protection of educational establishments and historic monuments and the conservation of the human and natural environment, in the event of armed conflict’.