Starvation (crime)

Bridget Conley and Alex de Waal enumerate several reasons why a perpetrator might choose to employ starvation: "(i) extermination or genocide; (ii) control through weakening a population; (iii) gaining territorial control; (iv) flushing out a population; (v) punishment; (vi) material extraction or theft; (vii) extreme exploitation; (viii) war provisioning; and (ix) comprehensive societal transformation".

[9] Historians Nicholas Mulder and Boyd van Dijk argue that it took a long time for starvation to be recognized as criminal because it is important to blockade tactics implemented in war, widely employed by the Western powers such as the United Kingdom and France that played a major role in the development of international law.

[6] Legal scholar Tom Dannenbaum argues that blockade-induced starvation should be considered a form of torture and prohibited on this basis.

One of these provisions is "other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health".

For murder to be charged, the accused's act or omission must have been made with intent to kill, inflict grievous bodily harm, or knowledge that death would occur.

[1] The crime against humanity of extermination includes "the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population".

[18] Unlike murder, it excludes dolus eventualis, and according to Ventura, "the accused must act with the intent to kill on a massive scale or to systematically subject a large number of people to conditions that would lead to their death.

[3] Unlike direct killing, there is a degree of distance between the perpetrator's actions in a starvation crime and the resulting effect on the victims.