Crimes Against Humanity - Essay Example

at this term first appeared in the preamble of the 1907 Hague Convention, the meaning of this term have evolved to take on a much broader meaning to include “anything atrocious committed on a large scale.”(Cherif Bassiouni (1998). Killing is morally evil and wars bring so many deaths that even though “decisions relating to war are not made in a moral vacuum” (Coates 1997) one can never claim that the death of innocent people are but the collateral damages of war. The term “crimes against humanity” has become so broad that it encompasses just all other types of violence against certain groups of people, sector or race in the past years.

To help us understand the term “crimes against humanity better” let us look into some specific events in the history of humankind where war has created such atrocities that dehumanize a person. It is interesting to note at this point that when we say crimes against humanities, we do not only mean deaths of thousands of people but also those events that reduce a person into a mean object of hate or experimentation. There have been many events in the past involving great loss of human lives, but throughout the recorded history of mankind nothing could ever surpass the holocaust when it comes to violations of the human dignity.

In the generic sense of the word, a holocaust is any event where there is great loss of human life as is near total destruction by fire (American Heritage Encyclopedia 2005). However, the meaning of this word somewhat changed with the event that led to the death of some 11 million people. The holocaust is one of the best examples of “crimes against humanity”. Between 1933-1945, around 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jewish people were systematically killed when the Nazi movement and its supporter ruled the most part of Europe1.

Although most of Hitler’s target was the Jews, there are also other people who suffered and died on the process under the brutality of the military, the