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A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the ...
The My Lai massacre was the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, almost entirely civilians, most of them women and children, conducted by U.S. soldiers from the Company C of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the 23rd (American) Infantry Division, on 16 March 1968.
The Geneva Conventions define the rights and protections afforded to non-combatants who fulfill the criteria of being protected persons. [3] The treaties of 1949 were ratified, in their entirety or with reservations, by 196 countries. [4] The Geneva Conventions concern only protected non-combatants in war.
This article lists and summarizes the war crimes that have violated the laws and customs of war since the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.. Since many war crimes are not prosecuted (due to lack of political will, lack of effective procedures, or other practical and political reasons), [better source needed] historians and lawyers will frequently make a serious case in order to prove that ...
The International Criminal Court (ICC or ICCt) is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands.It is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression.
Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, collective punishment is a war crime. By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World War I and World War II. In the First World War, the Germans executed Belgian villagers in mass retribution for resistance activity during the Rape of Belgium. In ...
The crime of aggression was conceived by Soviet jurist Aron Trainin in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. Pictured: Stalingrad in ruins, December 1942. A crime of aggression or crime against peace is the planning, initiation, or execution of a large-scale and serious act of aggression using state military ...
e. In the context of war, perfidy is a form of deception in which one side promises to act in good faith (such as by raising a flag of truce) with the intention of breaking that promise once the unsuspecting enemy is exposed (such as by coming out of cover to take the "surrendering" prisoners into custody). Perfidy constitutes a breach of the ...