What is crime against humanity ?
What follows is a summing up international treaties including the status of international courts .
The first legal definition is given by article 6-c) of the Statute of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, of August 8, 1945:
"Crimes against humanity, i.e. murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and any other inhumane act committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when these acts or persecutions, whether or not they constituted a violation of the domestic law of the country where they were perpetrated, were committed as a result of any crime falling within the jurisdiction of the court, or in connection with this crime. ".
Several texts have taken up or supplemented this definition, including those of the statutes of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in 1993, the International Criminal Tribunal to try crimes committed in Rwanda in 1994, then the International Criminal Court in 1998.
A crime against humanity presupposes a generalized or systematic attack against any civilian population, even without recourse to arms, by a state, a de facto power or an organization, even non-state. An incentive followed by effect is enough.
You have to prove the attack and its systematic nature, its organization, the link between the criminal acts.
The persons prosecuted will be sentenced in the event of their knowing participation in this attack, and the fact that their act is part of this attack. This consciousness can be presumed, for example in the case of a concentration camp guard.
In international law, it currently includes:
- murder, including attacks on the integrity of the victim resulting in death, even without intention to kill;
- the extermination of a population, or a set of behaviors such that death results therefrom, which brings the incrimination closer to that of genocide; it requires a certain number of victims, and planning, which implies that an executor can be condemned for a single victim;
- enslavement, forced labor not essential to establish it, trafficking,
- the deportation or the forced transfer of population, the constraint being able to be indirect, but there can be licit transfers, for example, for the construction of a dam;
- imprisonment or another form of severe deprivation of liberty, in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
- torture, which consists of the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, whether to obtain information, to punish, to exert pressure or to discriminate;
- rape, consisting of an act of penetration and coercion and sexual violence; forced sterilization is included;
- persecution, including damage to property, resulting from a discriminatory policy; it includes discrimination policies; discrimination based on sex does not include discrimination against homosexuals;
- enforced disappearances;
- apartheid;
- other inhumane acts, in fact any act causing great suffering or seriously damaging bodily integrity or physical or mental health.
the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide7 adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court8 adopted in 1998. The Convention in its article 2 and the Statute in its article 6 means by (crime of) genocide
“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
a) murder of members of the group;
b) serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) intentionally inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d) measures aimed at preventing births within the group;
e) forced transfer of children from the group to another group. »
