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Espionage or spying is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information. A person who commits espionage is called an espionage agent or spy. Any individual or spy ring, in the service of a government, company or independent operation, can commit espionage. The practice is clandestine, as it is by definition unwelcome. In some circumstances, it may be a legal tool of law enforcement and in others, it may be illegal and punishable by law.
Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplomats, or its secret services for a hostile and foreign power, or attempting to kill its head of state. A person who commits treason is known in law as a traitor.
A war crime is an act that constitutes a serious violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility. Examples of crimes include intentionally killing civilians or prisoners, torturing, destroying civilian property, taking hostages, performing a perfidy, raping, using child soldiers, pillaging, declaring that no quarter will be given, and seriously violating the principles of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity.
Execution by firing squad, in the past sometimes called fusillading, is a method of capital punishment, particularly common in the military and in times of war. Execution by shooting is a fairly old practice. Some reasons for its use are that firearms are usually readily available and a gunshot to a vital organ, such as the brain or heart, most often will kill relatively quickly.
Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court that ruled the application of military tribunals to citizens when civilian courts are still operating is unconstitutional. In this particular case, the Court was unwilling to give President Abraham Lincoln's administration the power of military commission jurisdiction, part of the administration's controversial plan to deal with Union dissenters during the American Civil War. Justice David Davis, who delivered the majority opinion, stated that "martial rule can never exist when the courts are open" and confined martial law to areas of "military operations, where war really prevails", and when it was a necessity to provide a substitute for a civil authority that had been overthrown. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and three associate justices filed a separate opinion concurring with the majority in the judgment, but asserted that Congress had the power to authorize a military commission, although it had not done so in Milligan's case.
The Espionage Act of 1917 is a United States federal law passed on June 15, 1917, shortly after the U.S. entry into World War I. It has been amended numerous times over the years. It was originally found in Title 50 of the U.S. Code but is now found under Title 18. Specifically, it is 18 U.S.C. ch. 37
Military tribunals in the United States are military courts designed to try members of enemy forces during wartime, operating outside the scope of conventional criminal and civil proceedings. The judges are military officers and fulfill the role of jurors. Military tribunals are distinct from courts-martial.
International humanitarian law (IHL), also referred to as the laws of armed conflict, is the law that regulates the conduct of war. It is a branch of international law which seeks to limit the effects of armed conflict by protecting persons who are not participating in hostilities, and by restricting and regulating the means and methods of warfare available to combatants.
The Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu, also the Tokkō, was established in 1911, for the high policing, investigation, and control of political groups and ideologies deemed to threaten the public order of the Empire of Japan. As the civilian counterpart to the military police forces of the Kenpeitai (army) and of the Tokkeitai (navy), the Tokkō's functions were criminal investigation and counter-espionage. The Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu was also known as the Peace Police and as the Thought Police.
In the context of war, perfidy is a form of deception in which one side promises to act in good faith with the intention of breaking that promise once the unsuspecting enemy is exposed. Perfidy constitutes a breach of the laws of war and so is a war crime, as it degrades the protections and mutual restraints developed in the interest of all parties, combatants and civilians.
Carl Hans Lody, alias Charles A. Inglis, was a reserve officer of the Imperial German Navy who spied in the United Kingdom in the first few months of the First World War.
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinov was a Russian general of the Imperial Russian Army who served as the Chief of the General Staff from 1908 to 1909 and the Minister of War from 1909 to 1915.
Capital punishment in Finland has been abolished de jure.
Capital punishment is prohibited in Germany by constitution. It was abolished in West Germany in 1949 and East Germany in 1987. The last person executed in Germany was the East German Werner Teske, killed in an East German prison in Leipzig in 1981.
Andrew Humphreys was a U.S. Representative from Bloomfield, Greene County, Indiana, who served in the Forty-fourth Congress. Prior to the American Civil War, Humphreys was as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives, and an Indian agent for Utah. In 1864 Humphreys was a defendant in a controversial trial by a military commission that convened on October 21 at Indianapolis, where he and three others were convicted of treason. Humphreys was sentenced to hard labor for the remainder of the war, but the sentence was modified three weeks later to allow for his release. At the end of the war, Humphreys resumed a career in politics, which included terms in Forty-fourth Congress and the Indiana Senate.
Richard Motoso Sakakida was a United States Army intelligence agent stationed in the Philippines at the outbreak of World War II. He was captured and tortured for months after the fall of the country to Imperial Japan, but managed to convince the Japanese that he was a civilian and was released. Employed by the Japanese Fourteenth Army, he gathered and passed along valuable information to the Philippine resistance. He also planned and participated in the mass escape of about 500 Filipino prisoners.
Richard Reeve Baxter was a widely published American jurist and from 1950 until his death the preeminent figure on the law of war. Baxter served as a judge on the International Court of Justice (1979–1980), as a professor of law at Harvard University and as an enlisted man and officer in the U.S. Army (1942–46,1948–54). He is noted for consistently favoring moves that enhanced the protections afforded to those injured or threatened by armed conflict. Baxter authored the 1956 revision of the U.S. Army Manual on the Law of Land Warfare and was a leading representative of the U.S. at the Geneva conferences that concluded the Protocols to the Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War. Baxter also, at the time of his death, was the preeminent scholar on the law of international waterways. He died of cancer one year into his term as a judge of the International Court of Justice.
The Netherlands remained neutral during World War I. This stance arose partly from a strict policy of neutrality in international affairs that started in 1830 with the secession of Belgium from the north. Dutch neutrality was not guaranteed by the major powers in Europe, nor was it a part of the Dutch constitution. The country's neutrality was based on the belief that its strategic position between the German Empire, German-occupied Belgium, and the British guaranteed its safety.
In the United States, there are both federal and state laws prohibiting treason. Treason is defined on the federal level in Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution as: "levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Most state constitutions include similar definitions of treason, specifically limited to levying war against the state, "adhering to the enemies" of the state, or aiding the enemies of the state, and requiring two witnesses or a confession in open court. Fewer than thirty people have ever been charged with treason under these laws.
References
- ↑ Baxter, Richard (2013). "The Duty of Obedience to the Belligerent Occupant". Humanizing the Laws of War: Selected Writings of Richard Baxter. Oxford University Press. p. 16. ISBN 9780199680252.
- ↑ Simpson, A.W. Brian (2003). "The invention of trials in camera in security cases". In Mulholland, Maureen; Melikan, R.A. (eds.). The Trial in History: Domestic and international trials, 1700–2000 . Manchester University Press. p. 80. ISBN 9780719064869.
- ↑ Simpson, p. 81