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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.
The Nuremberg principles are a set of guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime. The document was created by the International Law Commission of the United Nations to codify the legal principles underlying the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi party members following World War II.
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).
Sexual violence is any harmful or unwanted sexual act—or attempt to obtain a sexual act through violence or coercion—or an act directed against a person's sexuality without their consent, by any individual regardless of their relationship to the victim. This includes forced engagement in sexual acts, attempted or completed, and may be physical, psychological, or verbal. It occurs in times of peace and armed conflict situations, is widespread, and is considered to be one of the most traumatic, pervasive, and most common human rights violations.
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).
The Gacaca courts were a system of transitional justice in Rwanda following the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. The term 'gacaca' can be translated as 'short grass' referring to the public space where neighborhood male elders (abagabo) used to meet to solve local problems. The name of this system was then adopted in 2001 as the title of the state's new criminal justice system "Gacaca Courts" to try those deemed responsible for the 1994 genocide against the tutsi where over an estimated 1,000,000 people were killed, tortured and raped. In 1994, the United Nations Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to try high-ranking government and army officials accused of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The Gacaca Courts were established in law in 2001, began to operate on a trial basis in 2002 and eventually came to operate as trials throughout the country by early 2007. The Gacaca courts were presented as a method of transitional justice, claimed by the Rwandan government to promote communal healing and rebuilding in the wake of the Rwandan Genocide. Rwanda has especially focused on community rebuilding placing justice in the hands of trusted citizens.
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.
Génocidaires are Rwandans who are guilty of genocide due to their involvement in the mass killings which were perpetrated in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, in which 800,000 Rwandans, primarily Tutsis and moderate Hutu, were murdered by the Interahamwe. In the aftermath of the 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 a fringe of Western writers dispute that reality.
Crimes against humanity under communist regimes occurred during the 20th century, and they included forced deportations, massacres, torture, forced disappearance, 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.
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.
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
- ↑ 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.