War Crimes - What the Publis Should Know

Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know

The term war crime brings to mind a combination of horrific images, concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, execution of prisoners, rape, and bombardment of cities. These images correspond in many ways to the legal definitions of the term, but international law draws lines that do not in all ways match our sense of the most awful behavior.

War crimes are those violations of the laws of war, or international humanitarian law (IHL) that deserve individual criminal responsibility. While limitations on the conduct of armed conflict date back at least to the Chinese warrior Sun Tzu (sixth century B.C.), the ancient Greeks were among the first to regard such prohibitions as law. The notion of "war crimes" appeared more fully in the Hindu code of Manu (around 200 B.C.), and eventually made its way into Roman and European law. The first true trial for war crimes is generally considered to be that of Peter von Hagenbach, who was tried in 1474 in Austria and sentenced to death for wartime atrocities. (Gutman and Rieff pg. 374)

By World War I, States had accepted that certain violations of the laws of war, much of which had been defined in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, were crimes. The 1945 Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg defined

war crimes as "violations of the laws or customs of war," including murder, ill-treatment, or deportation of civilians in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war; killing of hostages; raiding of public or private property; meaningless destruction of towns; and devastation not militarily necessary. (Gutman and Rieff pg. 374)

The 1949 Geneva Conventions marked the first inclusion in a humanitarian law treaty of a set of war crimes and the grave breaches of the conventions. Each of the four Geneva Conventions (on wounded and sick on land, wounded and sick at sea, prisoners of war, and civilians) contains its own list of grave breaches. The list in its entirety is: willful killing; torture or inhuman treatment (including medical experiments); willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health; extensive destruction and misuse of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully; forcing a prisoner of war or civilian to serve in the forces of the hostile power; willfully depriving a prisoner of war or protected civilian of the rights of a fair and regular trial; unlawful deportation or transfer of a protected civilian; unlawful confinement of a protected civilian; and taking of hostages. Additional Protocol I of 1977 expanded the protections of the Geneva Conventions for international conflicts to include as grave breaches: certain medical experimentation; making civilians and non-defended areas the object or unavoidable victims of attack; the deceitful use of the Red Cross or Red Crescent emblem; transfer of an occupying power of parts of its population to occupied territory;

unjustifiable delays in release of POWs; apartheid; attack on historic