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A Crime Against Humanity has been defined as “a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population.” Such crimes include the murder of political or social groups that are unprotected by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. Since the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and mass murder of other ethnic, religious, political and social groups, the crime of “extermination” has been a crime against humanity, and its definition includes not only massacres but also “the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population.” Enslavement and deportation are also crimes against humanity. The purpose of these persecutions is not relevant to guilt, nor do charges of crimes against humanity require proof, as the charge of genocide does, of specific “intent to destroy” a group “in whole or in part.”

Further details on the current international law on Crimes Against Humanity may be found in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,  accessible at www.un.org/icc, article 7, 1-2, and in Chérif Bassiouni, “Crimes against Humanity,” Crimes of War Project: www.crimesofwar.org/thebook/crimes-against-humanity.html.

With the adoption of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, genocide became a crime under international law. The convention also mandates that signatories of the convention incorporate the criminalization of genocide into their own legal code.  Although the punitive element of the convention as not invoked until the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda (the ICTY and ICTR, respectively) did so in the late 1990s, a considerable body of jurisprudence has developed both prior to and since then.

The development of a regime of justice related to genocide is most apparent in international law: While the ICTY and ICTR have made several convictions of genocide between them.  The International Court of Justice has made a determination that genocide did occur in Srebenica (and that the government of Serbia was legally complicit in failing to prevent Bosnian Serb militias from committing genocide despite the knowledge and means of doing so). The partially international Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has brought genocide-related charges as well.  The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Omar Bashir, president of Sudan, on genocide charges.

The national realm of justice ought not to be overlooked as well, though.  In several South American countries, genocide law includes “political groups” among those to be protected from intent to destroy. Other judges have considered invoking universal jurisdiction to indict individuals living outside their national realm for crimes against others outside their national realm for crimes committed outside their national realm.

Meanwhile, in countries that have experienced genocide, justice is not restricted to the use of the genocide convention.  National courts have considered both genocide and genocide-related charges (such as crimes against humanity, or simply murder, in the context of widespread mass violence) in several places.  Rwanda’s gacaca courts, created at the grassroots level, ultimately heard almost two million trials related to the 1994 genocide.