Irreversible Darkness: State-Sponsored Internet Shutdowns and the Forgotten Cultural Dimension of International Law

[Fahimeh Heydari Torkabad is a Ph.D. Candidate in International Law at Allameh Tabataba’i University and a Lecturer at Kharazmi University]

On March 1, 2026, blast waves from a missile strike targeting the Arg Square judicial complex in Tehran reached the Golestan Palace, shattering nineteenth-century stained glass and fracturing its iconic Mirror Hall. UNESCO countered the geopolitical rhetoric by declaring that Golestan Palace represents the irreplaceable story of human civilization rather than a legitimate target of military conflict. Yet, the capacity of independent experts and civil society to document this localized destruction had already vanished forty-eight hours prior to the strike. Data compiled by network analysts indicates that Iran’s HTTP traffic plummeted instantaneously to a mere 2% across all major provinces on February 28. Technical monitors confirmed this systemic blackout as a deliberate, state-imposed disconnection designed to enforce a national digital quarantine. As of June 2026, this state-ordered shutdown has accumulated over 2,100 consecutive hours, persisting weeks after the signing of the April 8 ceasefire.

The structural consequences of this network blackout extend far beyond the conventional realm of information censorship or political repression. Dr. Hassan Fartousi, Secretary-General of the Iranian National Commission for UNESCO, announced that 132 historical sites across 20 provinces sustained unverified and irreversible damage during the active hostilities. A subsequent scientific assessment revealed that the blanket shutdown effectively blinded global satellite and ground-level efforts to track ongoing threats to vulnerable historic monuments. Because cultural data left unrecorded at the precise moment of physical destruction is permanently lost to history, a state that systematically dismantles the domestic capacity to document its sites violates a foundational fiduciary duty owed to the international community. While contemporary legal scholarship routinely maps the legal dimensions of such blackouts through the lenses of territorial sovereignty, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law, a crucial fifth dimension remains entirely unaddressed. This unexamined space involves the direct nexus between state-sponsored communication shutdowns and the positive obligations of peacetime preparedness enshrined in the 1954 Hague Convention.

The Evolution of Peacetime Preparedness: From Sandbags to Digital Infrastructure

To understand how internet shutdowns engage cultural property law, international legal doctrine must trace the evolution of the obligation of preparedness 1954 Hague Convention, art. 3. Article 3 of the 1954 Hague Convention mandates that High Contracting Parties undertake to prepare for the safeguarding of cultural property situated within their own territory against the foreseeable effects of an armed conflict by taking “such measures as they consider appropriate”. At the time of the treaty’s drafting in the mid-twentieth century, the operational understanding of “appropriate measures” was strictly analog, localized, and physical. Early treaty practice and the historical archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross demonstrate that preparedness was traditionally manifested through the construction of concrete bomb shelters, the placement of physical sandbagging around monuments, and the storage of paper microfilm archives in subterranean military bunkers.

However, the operational nature of both modern warfare and heritage preservation has undergone a profound structural transformation. In the landmark Navigational Rights case, the International Court of Justice firmly cemented the doctrine of evolutionary interpretation for generic treaty terms. The Court affirmed that international instruments must be interpreted in light of evolving state practice, customary developments, and technological advancements rather than remaining frozen in the historical conditions of their drafting. What constituted an “appropriate measure” via analog microfilm in 1954 naturally translates into digital documentation architecture, cloud-based data hosting, and 3D geospatial rendering in contemporary legal settings.

This technological baseline is now recognized as a binding standard of care in heritage law. The UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage explicitly establishes that digital preservation is no longer secondary to physical conservation, but represents an independent, indispensable component of safeguarding civilization’s memory. This charter serves as a subsequent interpretive agreement and state practice that informs the scope of Article 3 of the Hague Convention (VCLT 1969, art. 31(3)(b)). Consequently, the conceptual parameters of “preparedness” under Article 3 have progressively evolved to encompass the mandatory maintenance of the digital ecosystem required to generate, secure, and transmit cultural data.

The Practical and Legal Mechanics of Network Disruptions under Article 3

A total, state-sponsored internet shutdown does not merely restrict data transmission; it operates as an active, mechanical sabotage of the very tools required to fulfill modern Article 3 obligations (Tallinn Manual 2.0 2017, Rule 142). Practically, contemporary preparedness protocols rely entirely on a continuous, uninterrupted flow of digital information. Modern archeological safeguarding utilizes real-time, internet-connected structural monitoring sensors attached to fragile monuments, autonomous satellite-linked alerts, and crowdsourced mobile applications that allow experts to instantaneously upload high-resolution 3D laser-scanning data to secure cloud servers. This off-site transmission is vital because if cultural data remains localized on physical hard drives within an active combat zone, it faces the same physical vulnerability as the monument itself.

When a state imposes a blanket internet shutdown during a crisis, it intentionally severs this digital umbilical cord. The practical disruption is immediate because real-time structural sensors are instantly blinded, automatic monitoring systems are disconnected, and field archeologists are physically prevented from uploading documentation to secure remote repositories. By deliberately dismantling the network infrastructure, the state actively paralyzes the execution of its peacetime safeguarding protocols.

Legally, this conduct directly engages and breaches the core text of Article 3. An interpretation of the Hague Convention that permits a High Contracting Party to destroy the technical infrastructure essential for executing its treaty duties renders the entire commitment illusory, violating the foundational principle of treaty effectiveness. Critically, this framework does not impose an affirmative, regressive economic obligation on developing states to build high-tech infrastructure, but rather enforces a strict negative prohibition against the bad-faith, active dismantling of an already existing and functional network.

Furthermore, this protective obligation is reinforced by complementary bodies of international heritage law. Article 5 of the 1999 Second Protocol explicitly operationalizes Article 3 by designating the “preparation of inventories” as a concrete preparatory measure. Because international standards set by the International Council on Monuments and Sites require that inventories employ up-to-date information technology to ensure records are readily accessible — including on-site — for purposes of research, management, and disaster relief, and that their location be made public to facilitate exchange and retrieval at the national and international level, a state cannot claim to fulfill Article 5 while simultaneously cutting the connectivity required to access those databases.

This duty is further supported by the systemic framework of the 1972 World Heritage Convention, which imposes a continuous, affirmative duty on states to protect and transmit the cultural heritage situated on their territory to future generations. Similarly, the 2003 UNESCO Declaration Concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage states that a state’s failure to take all necessary measures to prevent the destruction of heritage engages its international responsibility. When viewed through this interconnected web of international law, an internet shutdown during periods of heightened tension is not a legitimate exercise of territorial sovereignty, but a multi-layered violation of international cultural obligations.

Dismantling the Defense of Military Necessity: The White SIM Card Parallel

Faced with this manifest breach, a state cannot retreat behind the traditional defense of military necessity to justify a total network blockade. Under customary international humanitarian law, military necessity is never an absolute license; it is strictly bounded by the principles of proportionality, distinction, and necessity, requiring that no less restrictive, operationally viable alternative exists to counter a legitimate security threat. Evolving state practice heavily refutes the claim that total blackouts are a necessary or unavoidable military measure during conflict. Cloudflare Radar data indicates that Palestine under the bombardment of Gaza, Syria throughout its protracted civil war, and Ukraine under full-scale conventional invasion all maintained substantial information flows without resorting to complete domestic blackouts. Indeed, the Ukrainian telecom operator Kyivstar invested 913 million dollars in network resilience during active hostilities to enable civilian initiatives like Backup Ukraine to successfully archive 50 terabytes of cultural data via mobile scanning.

More damningly, technical findings compiled by civil society groups reveal that approximately 16,000 state, judicial, and military officials within Iran retained completely unrestricted, high-speed access to the global internet throughout the 2026 crisis via a segregated, pre-engineered “White SIM Cards” network. This dual-access architecture carries profound legal implications under the law of state responsibility. It demonstrates conclusively that a tailored, targeted, and less restrictive security alternative was operationally feasible and at the immediate disposal of the state infrastructure. By maintaining a functional network for the ruling elite while blinding the rest of the nation, the state completely dismantles its own legal defense of absolute military necessity. Instead, the restriction serves a purely discriminatory, state-centric regime-preservation purpose. This systemic discrimination directly violates all three layers of state duties to respect, protect, and fulfill outlined under Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which guarantees the right of all individuals to take part in cultural life.

Corporate Attribution and Intergenerational Equity

This state breach was technically executed, sustained, and reinforced by a sophisticated parastatal architecture of denial. This infrastructure involved the deployment of military-grade GPS jammers that rendered civilian 3D architectural scans archaeologically worthless, alongside coordinated decrees criminalizing the domestic transmission of cultural damage images. In June 2023, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control and the European Union sanctioned ArvanCloud, a prominent domestic tech firm, for its direct role in developing the national intranet infrastructure optimized for state-ordered disconnections. Under the international law of state responsibility, encapsulated in ARSIWA, the attribution of this corporate conduct to the state can be articulated through clear alternative pleadings . Either ArvanCloud’s activities fall squarely under Article 5 of ARSIWA as an entity exercising elements of delegated governmental authority, or they satisfy the rigorous threshold of Article 8, operating entirely under the direction, instigation, or effective control of the state during the blackout execution. Furthermore, under pillar two of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, knowingly engineering a national network infrastructure optimized for localized suppression satisfies the legal threshold for corporate contribution to abuse, triggering independent corporate complicity.

Ultimately, the deliberate destruction of digital infrastructure converges with the foundational principle of intergenerational equity. The International Court of Justice, in its landmark Advisory Opinion on Climate Change, explicitly recognized that present generations are trustees of humanity, bound by erga omnes obligations to preserve the planetary and civilizational assets of the future. This fiduciary doctrine applies mutatis mutandis to international cultural heritage law. Heritage is not merely physical stone; it is the collective human memory, identity, and knowledge attached to it.

The long-term consequences of disrupting cultural documentation are catastrophic for post-conflict societies. When a state enforces a digital blackout during a crisis, what went unrecorded, unmapped, and unverified during those hours of darkness is permanently lost to the future. Without high-fidelity 3D renderings and continuous digital documentation, the authentic, precise post-conflict reconstruction of devastated historical sites becomes an impossibility. Future generations are thereby deprived of their fundamental right to access, study, and inherit their authentic cultural identity, inflicting a permanent epistemological wound on humanity’s shared history. Article 3 of the 1954 Hague Convention must be progressively interpreted to encompass the protection of underlying digital infrastructure, and the operational reality of a two-tier network system must serve as the primary legal benchmark to invalidate state defenses of military necessity. Golestan Palace has been fractured. What was not scanned or mapped during these ninety-one days cannot be recovered. It is time for international law to name the “shutdown” just as it names the bomb.