The International Law Commission recently submitted a draft convention to the United Nations General Assembly that would include provisions prohibiting, punishing, and defining crimes against humanity.
[7][8] Despite not being the subject of a dedicated treaty, the prohibition against crimes against humanity is considered customary international law and an established norm, meaning it is binding on all states without exception.
[13] This destruction may be achieved by both fatal and non-fatal acts, ranging from slavery to rape and from mass killings to forced sterilizations.
[18] Like crimes against humanity, the prohibition of genocide is customary international law and an established norm, meaning it is binding on all states without exception.
[24] War crimes run parallel to international humanitarian law — both contained primarily in the Geneva Conventions.
International humanitarian law encompasses a wide range of treatment that different categories of only protected persons are entitled to, such as the humane treatment of enemy civilians under belligerent military occupations and non-discriminatory medical care for the wounded and sick[25] or minimum conditions of detention for prisoners of war.
[27] The Geneva Conventions that emerged after World War II, as well as the Additional Protocols, provide the most robust framing of the laws of armed conflict.
[28] The term "ethnic cleansing" encompasses a broad range of unlawful actions with the intent of removing a group from a specific area.
[2] This may be done through non-violent acts, such as administrative regulations on movement and preventing access to medical care, education, or humanitarian aid.
[29] Finally, ethnic cleansing can be carried out through violent measures including rape, torture, forced deportation, mass incarceration, killings, and attacks on political and cultural figures and sites.
[30] Its relationship with genocide is particularly complicated due to the overlap in the intent to target a particular "national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
For example, the International Court of Justice determined that most of the acts committed in Bosnia by Serb forces were "ethnic cleansing," but fell short of genocide.
[16] The purpose that drives ethnic cleansing is to render a specific region homogeneous through the often violent expulsion of a minority group as opposed to its destruction.
[35] The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is the United Nations court established in 1993 to prosecute mass atrocity crimes committed in the Balkans in the 1990s.
[36] It addresses crimes committed from 1991 to 2001 against members of various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia — Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia.
[36] Since its inception, the ICTY has made precedent-setting decisions on mass atrocity crimes, including the precept that an individual's position does not protect them from prosecution.
[44] Since it opened in 1995, of the 93 individuals have been indicted by the ICTR, 62 have been found guilty of international humanitarian crimes and sentenced, 10 have been referred to national jurisdictions, 2 have died prior to verdicts, 3 fugitives have been referred to the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, and 2 indictments were withdrawn before their trials started.