What are War Crimes?
- War crimes are defined as severe violations of humanitarian laws during a conflict.
- The definition, established by the Rome Statute of the ICC, is derived from the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
- It is based on the idea that individuals can be held liable for the actions of a state or its military.
- The taking of hostages, wilful killings, torture or inhuman treatment of prisoners of war, and forcing children to fight are some of the more obvious examples.
What are the Criteria for War Crimes?
- Criteria: To decide whether an individual or a military has committed a war crime, international humanitarian law lays down three principles:
- Distinction: It is illegal to target objectives that are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objectives, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
- Proportionality: Proportionality prohibits armies from responding to an attack with excessive violence. For example: If a soldier is killed, for example, you cannot bomb an entire city in retaliation.
- Precaution: It requires parties to a conflict to avoid or minimize the harm done to the civilian population.
- Grey Area in Definition:
- Raids on cities or villages, bombing residential buildings or schools, and even the killing of groups of civilians do not necessarily amount to war crimes — not if their military necessity is justified.
- The same act can become a war crime if it results in unnecessary destruction, suffering, and casualties that exceed the military gain from the attack.
- Further, Civilian and military populations have become increasingly hard to distinguish
What is the difference between War Crimes & Crimes Against Humanity?
- The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (or Genocide Convention) separates war crimes from genocide and crimes against humanity.
- War crimes are defined as occurring in a domestic conflict or a war between two states.
- Genocide and crimes against humanity can happen in peacetime or during the unilateral aggression of a military toward a group of unarmed people.
Geneva Conventions (1949)
- The Geneva Conventions (1949) and their Additional Protocols are international treaties that contain the most important rules limiting the barbarity of war.
- They protect people who do not take part in the fighting (civilians, medics, aid workers) and those who can no longer fight (wounded, sick, and shipwrecked troops, prisoners of war).
- The First Geneva Convention protects wounded and sick soldiers on land during war.
- The Second Geneva Convention protects wounded, sick, and shipwrecked military personnel at sea during war.
- The Third Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war.
- The Fourth Geneva Convention affords protection to civilians, including those in occupied territory.
- India is a party to the Geneva Convention.
International Criminal Court?
- It is a permanent judicial body created by the 1998 Rome Statute of the ICC (its founding and governing document) and began functioning on 1st July 2002 when the Statute came into force.
- Headquarter: The Hague, Netherlands
- Members:
- 123 nations are States Parties to the Rome Statute and recognise the ICC’s authority.
- The USA, China, Russia, and India are not the members.
- The forum was established as a court of last resort to prosecute offenses that would otherwise go unpunished and has jurisdiction over four main crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.
ICC’s Jurisdiction and Working
- The Rome Statute grants the ICC jurisdiction over four main crimes:
- The Crime of Genocide
- Crimes against Humanity
- War crimes
- Crime of Aggression
- The Court may exercise jurisdiction in a situation where genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes were committed on or after 1 July 2002,
- The crimes were committed by a State Party national, or in the territory of a State Party, or in a State that has accepted the jurisdiction of the Court;
- The crimes were referred to the ICC Prosecutor by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) pursuant to a resolution adopted under Chapter VII of the UN charter.
- As of 17 July 2018, a situation in which an act of aggression would appear to have occurred could be referred to the Court by the Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, irrespective of whether it involves States Parties or non-States Parties.
- The ICC is intended to complement, not to replace, national criminal systems; it prosecutes cases only when States are unwilling or unable to do so genuinely.
- ICC is not a UN organization but has a cooperation agreement with the United Nations.
- When a situation is not within the Court’s jurisdiction, the United Nations Security Council can refer the situation to the ICC, granting it jurisdiction. This has been done in the Darfur (Sudan) and Libya situations.
