It is universally admitted that a neutral State cannot lend assistance to belligerents, and especially cannot allow them to make use of its territory without compromising its neutrality. Humanity, on the other hand, demands that a neutral State shall not be obliged to repel persons who beg refuge from death or captivity. The following rules are intended to reconcile these conflicting requirements:
79. The neutral State within the territory of which bodies of troops or individuals belonging to the armed force of the belligerents take refuge, must intern them at a place as distant as possible from the theater of war. It must do the same with persons using its territory as a means of carrying on military operations.
80. Interned persons may be kept in camps, or may be shut up in fortresses or other places of safety. The neutral State decides whether officers may be left free on parole on an engagement being entered into by them not to leave the neutral territory without authorization.
81. In default of special convention regulating the maintenance of interned persons, the neutral State supplies them with rations and clothes, and bestows care upon them in other ways to such extent as is required by humanity.
It also takes care of the matériel of war which the interned persons may have had with them on entering the neutral territory.
On the conclusion of peace, or sooner if possible, the expenses occasioned by the internment are repaid to the neutral State by the belligerent State to which the interned persons belong.
82. The provisions of the Convention of Geneva of the 22d August, 1864 (see above, Articles 10 to 18, 35 to 40, and 74) are applicable to the hospital staff, as well as to the sick and wounded who have taken refuge in, or been carried into, neutral territory.
Especially,
83. Sick and wounded who are not prisoners may be moved across neutral territory, provided that the persons accompanying them belong solely to the hospital staff, and that any matériel carried with them is such only as is required for the use of sick and wounded. The neutral State, across the territory of which sick and wounded are moved, is bound to take whatever measures of control are required to secure the strict observance of the above conditions.