Enshrined in the Geneva Convention is a protection which all PoWs are all owed

It is not surprising that American newspapers, with their usual high-mindedness, have, by and large, not carried the images from Al-Jazeera television of five American prisoners of war in Iraqi hands. It is equally unsurprising that most British newspapers – those both for and against the war – did so yesterday morning. The two exceptions were the Financial Times, which did not carry the pictures at all, and The Independent, which carried one picture, but pixillated out the face of the prisoner in it.

Article 13 of the Geneva Convention of 1949, dealing with the humane treatment of prisoners of war, states: "Prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity."

Of course, this article dates from before the age of television. The rule about "insults and public curiosity" is designed to protect prisoners of war from being paraded through cities and vilified by hostile crowds. But we believe that putting a prisoner in front of a TV camera and making him utter words such as "I was told to come here. I just follow orders" amounts to much the same thing.

The MoD last Friday went to the length of issuing this guidance: "The Ministry of Defence has asked that the faces of Iraqi prisoners of war should either be pixillated or obscured to prevent them being identified. This is a requirement under the Geneva Convention."

The convention is binding on governments, not the press or anyone else, but we take the view that our readers, being by and large in favour of the Geneva Conventions, would not want us to profit from a breach of them. The defence that the pictures will have the effect of eliciting sympathy for the prisoners and exposing the wickedness of their captors is unimpressive. Such sympathy or exposure can come about only through the process of people studying pictures and exclaiming: "Oh, the poor things." That is exactly the kind of "public curiosity" from which PoWs are supposed to be protected.

The Independent stated yesterday that it had decided to conceal the faces of all prisoners of war "in accordance with the Geneva Convention". That does not mean that we will never show the face of a prisoner of war. Our understanding of Article 13 is that it is intended to prevent belligerent powers making a public parade of PoWs for propaganda purposes or subjecting them to insults and ill-treatment. We do not intend to publish images that arise from that.

Prisoners of war on the battlefield or in the process of being removed from it by their captors do not seem to fall under that prohibition. In general, photographs of crowds of Iraqi prisoners on the battlefield are legitimate. But they raise a different problem, when their families may still be in the power of a dictator who takes a dim view of his soldiers surrendering. If any Iraqis look too cheerful about going into captivity, we may decide that it is a kindness to conceal or obscure their faces.