From Humanitarian Intervention to the Notion of the Responsibility to Protect - Dissertation Example

regimes who committed democide are likely to be dictatorial, such as Communists and Nazis.

The next sections of the introduction will initially define three key crimes that violate human rights the most, namely: war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Secondly, the struggle of dealing with these crimes, and the evolution of the means used for preventing them will be illustrated. The third section will cover the research question, objectives, and structure. The ultimate part will focus on exploring the problem by demonstrating the tension of state sovereignty and the debate of the R2P.     

War Crimes, Genocide and Crimes against Humanity      
War crimes refer to the excessive violation of human rights within wars, and a serious breach of international humanitarian law (Clarisse, 2011). There have been several codifications at the international level concerning war crimes, beginning with The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, followed by the Conventions of 12 August 1949 and their Additional Protocols I and II of 1977 and article 8 of the 1998 Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court. Murders, attacks on civilians (either prisoner, free, or refugees), and their goods, pillage, and rape are all considered war crimes (OHCHR, 2010). Moreover, “Genocide, crimes against humanity, mistreatment of civilians or combatants during the war can all fall under the category of war crimes. Genocide is the most severe of these crimes (BBC, 2009).

However, the second concept that must be clarified is genocide, which came from a Polish Jew called Raphael Lemkin in 1944 when he combined a Greek word (genos) meaning group, and a Latin word (side) which means killing (Rossil, 2003). Genocide can be officially defined with regard to Article II of the 1948 United Nation Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as:

“any of a number of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” 

Other crimes against humanity include “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in the execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated” (UN, 1949).

The massive number of deaths resulting from the aforementioned crimes led the international community to the adoption of humanitarian intervention in order to protect people’s violated rights, though the notion faced hesitant by some states due to its forcible nature, which had reminded them of the world wars painful memories.