This chapter discusses the emergence of crimes against humanity, the main definitional features, and the most important jurisprudence on crimes against humanity. The chapter reviews historic references, the Nuremberg Charter, and evolution through international jurisprudence. The chapter examines the meaning of ‘widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population’, including the controversy over the meaning of ‘civilian’ and the many controversies about the ICC Statute Article 7 requirement of a ‘state or organizational policy’. The chapter reviews the jurisprudence on the prohibited acts (also referred to as ‘inhumane acts’), including murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, forcible transfer, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, other sexual violence, persecution, forced disappearance, apartheid, and other inhumane acts.

The ICC launched in 2002 to judge cases against individuals accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. It is unique among international institutions in this book in that it imposes its obligations upon individual persons rather than governments. This chapter shows the powers and limits on the authority of the ICC to punish people for large-scale atrocities. The practical power of the ICC is shaped by both the difficulty of apprehending people and the active work of those who wish to remain insulated from accountability.

The final substantive chapter of the book looks at how all these rules are implemented and enforced, and what mechanisms exist to hold violators of the law accountable for their acts. Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions requires states to ‘ensure respect’ for the rules of IHL, which is achieved through a range of measures such as education of the armed forces and civil society in the rules of IHL and entrenching the rules in domestic legislation. The chapter describes the roles of the ICRC, Protecting Powers and the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. The development and content of international criminal law are examined, including individual responsibility for war crimes, lesser violations of IHL, crimes against humanity and genocide, and the concept of command responsibility is explained. The growth in international and hybrid criminal tribunals is noted, as well as the roles played by the United Nations and other organisations in encouraging adherence to the rules of IHL. Finally the chapter examines mechanisms for implementation, enforcement and accountability in non-international armed conflict.

The chapter begins by explaining the complementary role of criminal law in the application of international human rights. It then goes on to analyse the function of the concept of individual criminal responsibility under international law and its relationship to human rights violations. Subsequently, we examine the processes and mechanisms for enforcement of criminal rules under international law with an emphasis on policy rather than the procedural rules underpinning jurisdiction. The ‘peace versus justice’ debate, namely whether international prosecution should sometimes be side-lined in favour of negotiated solutions to ongoing conflicts, is an integral part of this discussion. Finally, the chapter concludes with an analysis of the two core mass international crimes, namely genocide and crimes against humanity with a view to demonstrating that their formulation is largely based on human rights (i.e. rights of victims), rather than criminal law, considerations.

This chapter discusses international criminal law (fighting political crimes) and transboundary police cooperation (fighting common crimes), though mechanisms such as the ICC, but also extradition and abduction

Under international criminal law (‘ICL’), individuals can be prosecuted and punished for conduct that is criminalised under customary international law and/or treaty. This differs from most branches of international law, which concern the rights and obligations of states. The rationale for holding individuals to account for such crimes was articulated in 1946 by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which stated: ‘Crimes against international law are committed by [people], not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.’ This chapter introduces this branch of international law, citing examples involving Australia as well as many other states. The chapter gives an overview of some of ILC’s key principles and aims, andoutlines the historical development of ICL. It explains how ICL is currently being enforced, considers the core crimes in ICL and discusses individual criminal responsibility and defences.

America emerged from World War II as the undisputed superpower. But during the war, the United States committed numerous inhumane acts against the innocent. It imprisoned thousands of American citizens in concentration camps because of their race. It used nuclear weapons on entire cities, indiscriminately killing some 200,000 civilians. And it imposed a punishing peace on Germany, which for two painful years caused countless children and adults to starve. As I explored the process that produced these decisions, I fully expected that racial animus and wartime hatreds alone would explain them. But it couldn’t. To my surprise, the majority of key decision makers, along with much of the American public, opposed these harsh measures. The most remarkable aspect of these policies was precisely how little support and how much ambivalence they actually produced. But if most of the government’s top leaders supported mercy, how and why were these vengeful policies adopted? That is the crucial question that drives Part I. Part II tackles the flip side of the puzzle. It asks how American leaders sought to, in essence, atone for some of its own wartime cruelties.

How does international law protect human rights?  We trace the development of human rights, focusing on the international response to the atrocities of World War II and the rapid pace of human rights conventions.  We demonstrate how the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights started a wave of other conventions designed to codify the treatment to which every human is entitled.  Not every state can achieve the wide array of protections these documents outline, but the UN has established methods for reporting violations that provide some minor satisfaction. The last half of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of regional human rights mechanisms, focusing on the European, Inter-American, and African systems and noting their jurisdictional differences. Finally, the development of mechanisms to respond to genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are detailed, including the criminal tribunals set up for specific atrocities and the International Criminal Court.

This chapter explores the scope of application of international criminal law with respect to the repression of international crimes affecting animals during war. It considers how war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide could apply. It then reviews all judgments – up to July 2020 – from the ad hoc/hybrid international criminal tribunals and the International Criminal Court where war crime allegations were adjudged and animals featured therein. It thus gives the first ever detailed account of how international criminal law has been used to address and repress international crimes that affect animals during war. The chapter then explores international criminal law’s limits and gaps in this area. It submits that animal cruelty during war should be recognised under international law in the same way that it is during peacetime under domestic law. It proposes that ‘other inhumane acts’ under the heading of crimes against humanity could be a means to potentially achieve this aim.

International tribunals are often assumed to deliver not only judgments against those guilty of mass crimes, but along the way to bring access to truth, reconciliation, peace, democratization, and the rule of law. This chapter challenges these claims with reference to the international hybrid tribunal in Cambodia, which has as its goals the trying of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the mid-to-late 1970s. The ways that survivors of the regime understood the proceedings in their own terms, with reference to Buddhist beliefs and their relationships with the spirits of the dead, were readily overlooked or misunderstood by a tribunal that was based on secular conceptions of law and judgment. The tribunal hearings in Cambodia offer insights into the ways that law grapples with crimes against humanity and how the potential for violence is embedded in the everyday ways that people articulate meaning and comprehend the world.

This chapter summarises the main elements in international crimes against civilians in situations of armed conflict and illustrates the prosecution of offenders. Only a tiny percentage of the crimes actually committed are even properly investigated and only in even fewer cases are the perpetrators actually prosecuted. This is despite the fact that the extent of unlawful violence against civilians would be greatly reduced by substantially enhanced efforts to ensure respect for domestic and international law by holding individuals to due account for their illegal actions.

In Chapter 2, the analysis focusses on the substantive applicability of the ICC’s framework to environmental harm. It surveys the aims of the Court, as set out in its Preamble; the jurisdictional and admissibility criteria governing the Court’s activities; and the substantive provisions of the Rome Statute of the ICC, namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.

This chapter examines how a cyberattack that has consequences similar to a kinetic or physical attack – causing serious loss of life or physical damage – could be encompassed within the crimes that may be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court (“ICC”). While it is a very limited subset of cyber operations that might fall within the ambit of the ICC’s Rome Statute, the chapter explains when and how a cyberattack could constitute genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or the crime of aggression. The chapter additionally acknowledges limitations as to which attacks would be encompassed, given, particularly, the ICC’s gravity threshold as well as the hurdle of proving attribution by admissible evidence that could meet the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Notwithstanding such limitations, increased awareness of the largely previously overlooked potential of the Rome Statute to cover certain cyberattacks could potentially contribute to deterring such crimes and to reaching the goal of a state of “cyber peace.”