Crime against humanity
A crime against humanity is a term in international law that refers to acts of murderous persecution against body of people, as being the criminal offence above all others. The term was first used in the preamble of the Hague Convention of 1907, and subsequently used during the Nuremberg trials as a charge for actions such as the Holocaust which did not violate a specific treaty but were deemed to require punishment.
The term has been criticized for being extremely vague and for being politically defined. For example, Nazi attempts to eliminate certain ethnic groups are widely recognized as having been crimes against humanity, yet Soviet and American persecutions of certain groups are not. The systematic persecution of African people by the South African apartheid government was recognized as a crime against humanity by the United Nations in 1966.
In its Article 7, the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court in 2003 says:
- For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack: (a) Murder; (b) Extermination; (c) Enslavement; ... [1]
List of alleged crimes against humanity in the 20th century
Crimes against humanity allegedly committed by Turkey
- 1915-1916: The Turkish genocide on the Armenians; about 1.5 million people die.
- 1922: The Asia Minor catastrophe: Turkish troops destroy Smyrna and kill tens of thousands of Greek civilians.
Alleged crimes against humanity during and related to World War II
Crimes allegedly committed by Axis powers
- 1933-1945: The Holocaust: German Nazis kill about 6 million Jews, 500,000 Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, social democrats and communists throughout Europe.
- 1933-1945: the so-called "Aktion T 4" (euthanasia-program), mass murder of about 80,000 handicapped and chronically ill people. Among them are many children and "foreign workers".
- 1937-1945: The Japanese war against China, which involved serious crimes against the Chinese civilian population.
- 1938-1943: German armed forces systematically displace and kill Czech, Polish and Russian people (among others) during the "war of extermination" ("Vernichtungskrieg") in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Crimes allegedly committed by Allied powers
- 1940: Stalin and other members of the Soviet politburo sign an order authorizing the Katyn Massacre. Comprised mainly of POWs, 22,000 Polish were executed and buried in mass graves.
- 1944-1945: Allied forces systematically bomb German residential areas in the Second World War.
- 1945: The United States drops nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. A napalm bomb hits Tokyo.
- 1945-1949: Displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Prussia and other former German Eastern territories (Beirut-decree) and Czechoslovakia (Beneš decrees) following the Second World War.
Alleged crimes against humanity involving communist states or movements
- 1918-1920: Mass atrocities by all sides in the course of Russian Civil War. See also Red Terror.
- 1930: Gulag is officially established in the Soviet Union, however many forced labour camps were in operation since 1918. See also Population transfer in the Soviet Union, Great Purge, Kurapaty.
- 1932-1933: The Holodomor in Ukraine, an artificial famine committed as part of Stalin's collectivization program; 4-7 million dead (estimates vary).
- 1940: The Katyn Massacre (see above)
- 1949-ongoing: Various violations against human rights by the People's Republic of China; see Tibet, East Turkestan and Southern Mongolia.
- 1966-1976: Mao Zedong's "cultural revolution" in China goes hand in hand with political cleansing; several million people die in China and autonomous areas.
- 1989: Suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by the People's Liberation Army.
- 1965: The government coup in Indonesia results in approximately 100,000 to 1,000,000 (presumably) partisans of the communist party.
- 1974-1989: The communist government of Romania under the leadership of Nicolae Ceauşescu systematically persecutes political enemies and plans the so-called "village destruction program". He also sets up "death homes" for handicapped, chronically ill and unwanted children. People older than 65 are deprived of medical aid; see also Elena Ceauşescu and Cighid.
- 1975-1979: Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge commit mass murders in Cambodia.
Alleged crimes against humanity committed in Africa
- 1899-1902 British concentration camps set up by Lord Kitchener in South Africa
- 1904: The German colonial power struck down the uprising of the Herero and Nama in the territory today known as Namibia. Large numbers of the Herero and Nama died of dehydration, survivors were forced to heavy labour; 25,000 to 100,000 (probably 65,000) Herero and 10,000 Nama died
- 1966: The systematic persecution of African people by the apartheid system in South Africa.
- 1979-ongoing: Several million black Africans die in a tribal genocide in Sudan's Darfur.
- 1994: Rwandan Genocide: in a civil war between Hutu and Tutsi, est. 800,000 people die.
Alleged crimes against humanity involving the Jews
- 1903-1906, 1917-1921: Waves of pogroms swept Russia and result in hundreds of thousands of Jews dead, more than 2 million emigrated during the period of 1880-1920.
- 1933-1945: The Holocaust (see above)
- 1948-1949: Arab-Israeli War: Five Arab states jointly attack the nascent State of Israel. Numerous massacres by all sides result in the Palestinian Exodus and Jewish exodus from Arab lands.
Alleged crimes against humanity involving chemical weapons
- 1915-1918: The use of poison gas in the First World War.
- 1962-1975: The United States use napalm and defoliant chemicals in Vietnam.
- 1988: On March 16, Saddam Hussein's regime launches a poison gas attack against the Kurdish city of Halabdscha in the North of Iraq; about 5,000 people (almost solely civilians) die.
Alleged Crimes against humanity committed by the United States and its client states
- 1944-1945: Allied strategic bombing of Axis states during World War II (see above)
- 1962-1975: U.S. actions in the Vietnam War
- 1973-1989: Augusto Pinochet and his military dictatorship assassinate political opponents and torture thousands of people in Chile.
- 2003-2005: War crimes by coalition forces in Iraq committed against Iraqi civilians
Other alleged crimes against humanity
- 1975-1981: Genocide in East Timor; the conflict holds in unrelieved intensity until 1998/1999.
- 1976-1982: The military dictatorship in Argentina tortures and assassinates political opponents.
- 1991-1999: Various crimes of war during the Bosnian war on each side.
- 1996-2001: Various violations against human rights by the radical Islamist Taliban-regime in Afghanistan.
- September 11, 2001: Terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda destroy the World Trade Center in New York City, killing several thousand civilians.
See also
- Crime against peace
- Democide
- Ethnic cleansing
- Genocide
- Mass murder
- Nuremberg Principles
- State terrorism
- War crime
- Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court