Crime against humanity

“ It must be admitted that the statute does not contain a definition at all and that characteristics of a crime against humanity are not stipulated. If you want to find such a specification for an independent crime against humanity, which is detached from crimes against peace and war crimes, you can only fall back on the notorious “sound feeling” and you will get lost in the void, because its limits are not fixed, but shift according to the political wish. ”

“ The mental element or mens rea required for murder as a crime against humanity is not limited to premeditation, but encompasses reckless disregard for human life. [29] The credible allegations support a finding of the crime against humanity of murder insofar as the SLA killed civilians through widespread shelling. ”

“ The Fourth Count of the Indictment is based on crimes against humanity. Chief among these are mass killings of countless human beings in cold blood. Does it take these men by surprise that murder is treated as a crime?
The First and Second Counts of the Indictment add to these crimes the crime of plotting and waging wars of aggression and wars in violation of nine treaties to which Germany was a party. There was a time, in fact I think the time of the first World War, when it could not have been said that war-inciting or war-making was a crime in law, however reprehensible in morals. ”

“ We shall shortly demonstrate that the IMT Charter and C. C. Law 10 provide for the punishment of crimes against humanity. As set forth in the indictment, the acts charged as crimes against humanity were committed before the occupation of Germany. They were described as racial persecutions by Nazi officials perpetrated upon German nationals. The crime of genocide is an illustration. We think that a tribunal charged with the duty of enforcing these rules will do well to consider, in determining the degree of punishment to be imposed, the moral principles which underlie the exercise of power. ”

“ Every country, civilised and uncivilised, the whole world at large in all ages, has been cursed with crime. To deal with but a fractional part of the evil deeds that have disgraced humanity would fill endless volumes ”

“ But I think—and I will revert later separately to Crimes against Peace and War Crimes—that this body of Crimes against Humanity constitutes, in the last analysis, nothing less than the perpetration for political ends and in a systematic manner, of common law crimes such as theft, looting, ill treatment, enslavement, murders, and assassinations, crimes that are provided for and punishable under the penal laws of all civilized states. ”

“ International Law, it may be said, does not attribute criminality to states, still less to individuals. But can it really be said on behalf of these Defendants that the offense of these aggressive wars, which plunged millions of peoples to their deaths, which by dint of war crimes and crimes against humanity brought about the torture and extermination of countless thousands of innocent civilians ”

“ Les Crimes Contre L’Humanite: c’est à dire l’assassinat, l’extermination, la réduction en esclavage, la déportation, et tout autre acte inhumain commis contre toutes populations civiles, avant ou pendant la guerre, ou bien les persécutions pour des motifs politiques, raciaux, ou réligieux, lorsque ces actes ou persécutions, qu’ils aient constitué ou non une violation du droit interne du pays où ils ont été perpétrés, ont été commis à la suite de tout crime rentrant dans la compétence du Tribunal, ou en liaison avec ce crime. ”

“ The war crimes and crimes against humanity charged herein against the defendant Milch include deportation, enslavement and mistreatment of millions of persons, participation in criminal medical experiments upon human beings, and murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhumane acts. ”

“ It is not necessary among the ruins of this ancient and beautiful city, with untold members of its civilian inhabitants still buried in its rubble, to argue the proposition that to start or wage an aggressive war has the moral qualities of the worst of crimes. The refuge of the defendants can be only their hope that International Law will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind that conduct which is crime in the moral sense must be regarded as innocent in law. ”

“ It is a mistake when we hold that criminals are merely perverse men, who are at war with social influences. On the other hand, they are the outgrowth of these influences. Crimes always take the hues and aspect of the country in which they are committed. They show not only guilty men but a guilty people. The world holds those nations to be debased where crime abounds. ”

“ The custom of burning human beings has become so common as scarcely to attract interest or unusual attention. I have always been among those who condemned in the strongest terms crimes of whatever character committed by members of my race, and I condemn them now with equal severity, but I maintain that the only protection to our civilization is a fair and calm trial of all people charged with crime, and in their legal punishment, if proved guilty. ”

“ Need it be noted here that even if in any locality an imprudent civilian had fired a shot, it would still remain—in accordance with the Hague Convention, International Law, and plain morality—a veritable crime to massacre in a heap, haphazard, and without enquiry, so many innocent souls? ”

“ Does justice demand that millions of innocents should fall, a ransom for the sins and the errors of others? Is crime to be washed out by crime? or murder by murder? And must your sons be not only victims but accomplices, assassinated and assassins?... ”

“ Viewed in the unclouded light of truth, what is war but organized murder, murder of malice aforethought, in cold blood, under sanction of impious law, through the operation of extensive machinery of crime, with innumerable hands, at incalculable cost of money, by subtle contrivances of cunning and skill, or amidst the fiendish atrocities of the savage, brutal assault. The outrages, which, under most solemn sanction, it permits and invokes for professed purposes of justice, cannot be authorized by any human power ”

“ So also in regard to crimes against humanity. The right of humanitarian intervention on behalf of the rights of man trampled upon by the State in a manner shocking the sense of mankind has long been considered to form part of the law of Nations. Here, too, the Charter merely develops a pre-existing principle. If murder, raping and robbery are indictable under the ordinary municipal laws of our countries shall those who differ only from the common criminal by the extent and systematic nature of their offenses escape accusation? ”

“ The merciless fascist machine tried to force them to be deprived of all that which, as a result of centuries of human development, had become an integral part of humanity.
Thus, death hung over them constantly, but on their way to death they were forced to pass through numerous and agonizing phases, insulting to human dignity, which constitute, in their entirety, the charge entitled in the Indictment “Crimes against Humanity.” ”

“ These manifestations are met with a ruthless military or mobile police jack-boot, with arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, and many examples of what has been described by world leaders as "judicial murder." ”

“ You would have the power of executing ill doers in accordance with the custom of your country; but the murder of a person who had committed no crime whatever is not to be permitted, and anything like wholesale cruelty and tyranny would be sternly repressed. ”

“ Evil masters came who awakened its primitive passions and made possible the atrocities which I have described to you. In truth, the crime of these men is that they caused the German people to retrogress more than 12 centuries.
Their crime is that they conceived and achieved, as an instrument of government, a policy of terrorism toward the whole of the subjugated nations and toward their own people; their crime is that they pursued, as an end in itself, a policy of extermination of entire categories of innocent citizens. ”

“ And now, after a hundred years, we see these methods deliberately revived by the greatest military power in the world, and applied with the same ruthlessness and with an added pedantry which makes them more inhuman. The perpetrators of the crime calculated quite correctly that they need fear no reluctance on the part of the nation, no qualms of conscience, no compassionate shrinking, no remorse. ”

“ Starvation, execution or massacre without trial, torture, rape, murder and wanton destruction of property were foremost among the outright violations of the laws of war and of the conscience of a civilized world. ”

“ Reaffirms its condemnation of all incitements to violence against civilians in situations of armed conflict, further reaffirms the need to bring to justice, in accordance with applicable international law, individuals who incite such violence, and indicates its willingness, when authorizing missions, to consider, where appropriate, steps in response to media broadcast inciting genocide, crimes against humanity and serious violations of international humanitarian law ”

“ In this context, defending human rights is said to amount to defending criminals, the death sentence is proclaimed to be the solution to the crime wave and there are instances, which are not strongly condemned in the press, of criminals being lynched as an alternative means of dispensing justice. ”

“ How shall we account for the inhumanity of those societies, in which punishments the most disproportionate to the crime, unmercifully take away the lives of men, whom the most urgent necessity, the dreadful alternative of famishing in a land of plenty, has obliged to become criminal? ”

“ They educated these criminals and created for them an atmosphere of impunity and drove their bloodthirsty hounds against peaceful citizens. They mocked at human conscience and self-respect. But those who were poisoned in murder vans and gas chambers, those who were torn to shreds, those whose bodies were burned in the ovens of crematoria and whose ashes were strewn to the winds, appeal to the conscience of the world. ”

“ They cannot see, therefore, how any constituted authorities among them can alter the nature of things, or how these beings can kill others in time of war, without the imputation of a crime, whom they could not kill without such an imputation in time of peace. They see in the book of the Great Spirit no dispensation given to societies to after the nature of actions, which are pronounced to be crimes. ”

“ First, innocent men are often slain and forced to sleep eternally in dishonored graves. Secondly, when men who are innocent are thus slain the real culprits are left behind to repeat their deeds and thus continue to bring reproach upon the race to which they belong. Thirdly, illegal execution always begets sympathy in the hearts of our people for a criminal, however dastardly may be his crime. ”

“ With regard to ‘crimes against humanity’, this at any rate is clear. The Nazis, when they persecuted and murdered countless Jews and political opponents in Germany, knew that what they were doing was wrong and that their actions were crimes which had been condemned by the criminal law of every civilized state. ”