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Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
Crimes against humanity are certain serious crimes committed as part of a large-scale attack against civilians. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war and against a state's own nationals as well as foreign nationals. Together with war crimes, genocide, and the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity are one of the core crimes of international criminal law, and like other crimes against international law have no temporal or jurisdictional limitations on prosecution.
Humanitarianism is an ideology centered on the value of human life, whereby humans practice benevolent treatment and provide assistance to other humans to reduce suffering and improve the conditions of humanity for moral, altruistic, and emotional reasons.
The Yugoslav Wars were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies that took place in the SFR Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2001. The conflicts both led up to and resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia, which began in mid-1991, into six independent countries matching the six entities known as republics that had previously constituted Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia. SFR Yugoslavia's constituent republics declared independence due to unresolved tensions between ethnic minorities in the new countries, which fuelled the wars. While most of the conflicts ended through peace accords that involved full international recognition of new states, they resulted in a massive number of deaths as well as severe economic damage to the region.
Lawfare is the use of legal systems and institutions to damage or delegitimize an opponent, or to deter an individual's usage of their legal rights. The term may refer to the use of legal systems and principles against an enemy, such as by damaging or delegitimizing them, wasting their time and money, or winning a public relations victory. Alternatively, it may describe a tactic used by repressive regimes to label and discourage civil society or individuals from claiming their legal rights via national or international legal systems. This is especially common in situations when individuals and civil society use nonviolent methods to highlight or oppose discrimination, corruption, lack of democracy, limiting freedom of speech, violations of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law.
The Responsibility to Protect is a global political commitment which was endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit in order to address its four key concerns to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The doctrine is regarded as a unanimous and well-established international norm over the past two decades.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1674, adopted unanimously on April 28, 2006, after reaffirming resolutions 1265 (1999) and 1296 (2000) concerning the protection of civilians in armed conflict and Resolution 1631 (2005) on co-operation between the United Nations and regional organisations, the Council stressed a comprehensive approach to the prevention of armed conflict and its recurrence.
There are a number of meanings for the term humanitarian. Here, humanitarian pertains to the practice of saving lives and alleviating suffering. It is usually related to emergency response whether in the case of a natural disaster or a man-made disaster such as war or other armed conflict. Humanitarian principles govern the way humanitarian response is carried out.
Rape during the Bosnian War was a policy of mass systemic violence targeted against women. While men from all ethnic groups committed rape, the vast majority of rapes were perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) and Serb paramilitary units, who used rape as an instrument of terror and key tactics as part of their programme of ethnic cleansing. Estimates of the number of women raped during the war range between 10,000 and 50,000. Accurate numbers are difficult to establish and it is believed that the number of unreported cases is much higher than reported ones.
The Syrian civil war is an ongoing multi-sided conflict in Syria involving various state-sponsored and non-state actors. In March 2011, popular discontent with the rule of Bashar al-Assad triggered large-scale protests and pro-democracy rallies across Syria, as part of the wider Arab Spring protests in the region. After months of crackdown by the government's security apparatus, various armed rebel groups such as the Free Syrian Army began forming across the country, marking the beginning of the Syrian insurgency. By mid-2012, the crisis had escalated into a full-blown civil war.
Crimes against humanity under communist regimes occurred during the 20th century, and they included forced deportations, massacres, torture, forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, political terrorization campaigns, ethnic cleansing, and enslavement, as well as the deliberate starvation of people. Additional events included the commition of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. Such events have been described as crimes against humanity.
The alliance between Algeria and Palestine is strong and enduring. Algeria is a supporter of the Middle East peace process and it has no diplomatic relations with Israel.
On 26 March 2015, Saudi Arabia, leading a coalition of nine countries from West Asia and North Africa, launched an intervention in Yemen at the request of Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who had been ousted from the capital, Sanaa, in September 2014 by Houthi insurgents during the Yemeni Civil War. Efforts by the United Nations to facilitate a power sharing arrangement under a new transitional government collapsed, leading to escalating conflict between government forces, Houthi rebels, and other armed groups, which culminated in Hadi fleeing to Saudi Arabia shortly before it began military operations in the country.
The Darfur genocide is the systematic killing of ethnic Darfuri people which has occurred during the War in Darfur and the ongoing War in Sudan (2023–present) in Darfur. The genocide, which is being carried out against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, has led the International Criminal Court (ICC) to indict several people for crimes against humanity, rape, forced transfer and torture. An estimated 200,000 people were killed between 2003 and 2005.
International and national courts outside Syria have begun the prosecution of Syrian civil war criminals. War crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government or rebel groups include extermination, murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture and imprisonment. "[A]ccountability for serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights is central to achieving and maintaining durable peace in Syria", stated UN Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo.
Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
All sides of the Tigray War have been repeatedly accused of committing war crimes since it began in November 2020. In particular, the Ethiopian federal government, the State of Eritrea, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and Amhara regional forces have been the subject of numerous reports of both war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Beginning with the onset of the Tigray War in November 2020, acute food shortages leading to death and starvation became widespread in northern Ethiopia, and the Tigray, Afar and Amhara Regions in particular. As of August 2022, there are 13 million people facing acute food insecurity, and an estimated 150,000–200,000 had died of starvation by March 2022. In the Tigray Region alone, 89% of people are in need of food aid, with those facing severe hunger reaching up to 47%. In a report published in June 2021, over 350,000 people were already experiencing catastrophic famine conditions. It is the worst famine to happen in East Africa since 2011–2012.
Extermination is a crime against humanity that consists of "the act of killing on a large scale". To be convicted of this crime, someone must play a role in a sufficiently-large scale killing of civilians, including those carried out by "the intentional infliction of conditions of life... calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population". It was first prosecuted at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, and was included in the enumerated crimes against humanity in the Rome Statute.
References
- ↑ Plowright, William (2023). "Obstruction". The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Philanthropy and Humanitarianism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-003-16271-1.
- ↑ Barber, Rebecca (2023). "What Blocked the UN's Response to the Earthquakes in Northwest Syria? Reflections on a Humanitarian System Premised on Government Consent". Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies: 1–32. doi:10.1163/18781527-bja10082. ISSN 1878-1373.
- ↑ Kurtzer, Jacob D. (2019). Denial, Delay, Diversion: Tackling Access Challenges in an Evolving Humanitarian Landscape. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-4422-8135-6.
- ↑ Mettraux 2020, p. 402.
- Mettraux, Guénaël (2020). International Crimes: Law and Practice: Volume II: Crimes Against Humanity. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-260391-3.