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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 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.
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 ...
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 War Crimes Act of 1996 is a United States federal statute that defines a war crime to include a " grave breach of the Geneva Conventions ", specifically noting that "grave breach" should have the meaning defined in any convention (related to the laws of war) to which the United States is a party. The definition of "grave breach" in some of ...
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). [5] It was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome, Italy on 17 July 1998 [6] [7] and it entered into force on 1 July 2002. [2] As of February 2024, 124 states are party to the statute. [8]
Atrocity crime. An atrocity crime is a violation of international criminal law that falls under the historically three legally defined international crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. [1] Ethnic cleansing is widely regarded as a fourth mass atrocity crime by legal scholars and international non-governmental ...
Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplomats, or its secret services for a hostile and foreign power, or attempting to kill its head of state.