Related Research Articles
Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people.
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.
The Doctors' Trial was the first of 12 trials for war crimes of high-ranking German officials and industrialists that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone in Nuremberg, Germany, after the end of World War II. These trials were held before US military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The trials are collectively known as the "subsequent Nuremberg trials", formally the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT).
Ruth Closius-Neudeck was a Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) supervisor at a Nazi concentration camp complex from December 1944 until March 1945. She was executed for war crimes for her role in the Holocaust.
The High Command Trial, also known initially as Case No. 12, and later as Case No. 72, was the last of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone of Germany in Nuremberg after the end of World War II. These twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the "subsequent Nuremberg trials" or, more formally, as the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT).
International criminal law (ICL) is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetration. The core crimes under international law are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.
In the practice of international law, command responsibility is the legal doctrine of hierarchical accountability for war crimes, whereby a commanding officer (military) and a superior officer (civil) is legally responsible for the war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed by his subordinates; thus, a commanding officer always is accountable for the acts of commission and the acts of omission of his soldiers.
The United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), initially the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes, was a United Nations body that aided the prosecution of war crimes committed by Nazi Germany and other Axis powers during World War II.
After World War I, the effort to prosecute Ottoman war criminals was taken up by the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and ultimately included in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman government organized a series of courts martial in 1919–1920 to prosecute war criminals, but these failed on account of political pressure. The main effort by the Allied administration that occupied Constantinople fell short of establishing an international tribunal in Malta to try the so-called Malta exiles, Ottoman war criminals held as POWs by the British forces in Malta. In the end, no tribunals were held in Malta.
Superior orders, also known as just following orders or the Nuremberg defense, is a plea in a court of law that a person, whether civilian, military or police, should not be considered guilty of committing crimes ordered by a superior officer or official. It is regarded as a complement to command responsibility.
Wartime sexual violence is rape or other forms of sexual violence committed by combatants during an armed conflict, war, or military occupation often as spoils of war, but sometimes, particularly in ethnic conflict, the phenomenon has broader sociological motives. Wartime sexual violence may also include gang rape and rape with objects. It is distinguished from sexual harassment, sexual assaults and rape committed amongst troops in military service.
Génocidaires are those who commit acts of genocide. The term was used initially in reference to Rwandans who are guilty of genocide due to their involvement in the mass killings which were perpetrated in Rwanda during the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 Rwandans, primarily Tutsis and moderate Hutu, were murdered by the Interahamwe. In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, Rwandans who organized and led the genocide were put on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Those guilty of lesser crimes, such as participation, profiting through seizing Tutsi property, and the like, were put on trial in gacaca courts. Today, the ICTR has indicted over ninety-three people for genocide. In 2020, Félicien Kabuga, the main financier of the Rwandan Genocide, was found in suburban France after evading capture for over twenty-six years.
Rwandan genocide denial is the pseudohistorical assertion that the Rwandan genocide did not occur, specifically rejection of the scholarly consensus that Rwandan Tutsis were the victims of genocide between 7 April and 19 July 1994. The perpetrators, a small minority of other Hutu, and some fringe Western writers dispute that reality.
Hate media is media that contributes to the demonization and stigmatization of people who belong to different groups. It has played an influential role in the incitement to genocide, with notable examples of it being Radio Televizija Srbije during the wars in Yugoslavia, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) during the Rwandan genocide, and Nazi Germany's Der Stürmer newspaper.
Utilitarian genocide is one of five forms of genocide categorized and defined in 1975 by genocide scholar Vahakn Dadrian. Utilitarian genocide is distinctly different from ideologically motivated genocides like the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide. This form of genocide has as its aim some form of material gain, such as the seizure of territory in order to gain control of economic resources for commercial exploitation. Two given examples of this form are the genocide of indigenous peoples in Brazil and the genocide of indigenous peoples in Paraguay.
Prevention of genocide is any action that works toward averting future genocides. Genocides take a lot of planning, resources, and involved parties to carry out, they do not just happen instantaneously. Scholars in the field of genocide studies have identified a set of widely agreed upon risk factors that make a country or social group more at risk of carrying out a genocide, which include a wide range of political and cultural factors that create a context in which genocide is more likely, such as political upheaval or regime change, as well as psychological phenomena that can be manipulated and taken advantage of in large groups of people, like conformity and cognitive dissonance. Genocide prevention depends heavily on the knowledge and surveillance of these risk factors, as well as the identification of early warning signs of genocide beginning to occur.
Incitement to genocide is a crime under international law which prohibits inciting (encouraging) the commission of genocide. An extreme form of hate speech, incitement to genocide is an inchoate offense and is theoretically subject to prosecution even if genocide does not occur, although charges have never been brought in an international court without mass violence having occurred. "Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" was forbidden by the Genocide Convention in 1948. Incitement to genocide is often cloaked in metaphor and euphemism and may take many forms beyond direct advocacy, including dehumanization and accusation in a mirror.
Genocidal intent is the specific mental element, or mens rea, required to classify an act as genocide under international law, particularly the 1948 Genocide Convention. To establish genocide, perpetrators must be shown to have had the dolus specialis, or specific intent, to destroy a particular national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. Unlike broader war crimes or crimes against humanity, genocidal intent necessitates a deliberate aim to eliminate the targeted group rather than merely displace or harm its members.
References
- ↑ Gudehus, Christian (2023). "The potential of - and problems with - perpetrator research". Handbook of Genocide Studies. Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 157–170. ISBN 978-1-80037-933-6.
- 1 2 "About - Journal of Perpetrator Research". jpr.winchesteruniversitypress.org. Retrieved 2024-04-19.
- ↑ Anderson, Kjell Follingstad; Jessee, Erin (2020). Researching Perpetrators of Genocide. United States: The University of Wisconsin. p. 9. ISBN 9780299329709.
- 1 2 3 Smeulers, Alette (2019). "Historical Overview of Perpetrator Studies". In Smeulers, Alette; Weerdesteijn, Maartje; Hola, Barbora (eds.). Perpetrators of International Crimes: Theories, Methods, and Evidence. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-882999-7.
- 1 2 "The Nuremberg Trials". The National WWII Museum. April 19, 2024.