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Full-Text Articles in Human Rights Law
Labeling Mass Atrocity: Does And Should International Criminal Law Rank Evil?, Steven R. Ratner
Labeling Mass Atrocity: Does And Should International Criminal Law Rank Evil?, Steven R. Ratner
Articles
This essay concerns mass atrocity, not the kind that happened on September 11th, but an older kind when governments and those under them and supported by them killed innocent civilians on the basis of their ethnicity, on the basis of their politics, on the basis of their religion, or other traits of the group. These acts, crimes against humanity and genocide, were criminalized in the period after World War II by the International Military Tribunal and then by the Genocide Convention. These were very, very important steps forward in international criminal law, but the result of the post-war period was, …
Can We Compare Evils? The Enduring Debate On Genocide And Crimes Against Humanity, Steven R. Ratner
Can We Compare Evils? The Enduring Debate On Genocide And Crimes Against Humanity, Steven R. Ratner
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A look back at the twentieth century reveals that the most critical steps in the criminalization of mass human rights constituted the academic work of Raphel Lemkin and his conceptualization of genocide; the International Military Tribunal Charter’s criminalization of crimes against humanity and the trials that followed; and the conclusion and broad ratification of the Genocide Convention. The Convention was the first treaty since those of slavery and the “white slave traffic” to criminalize peacetime actions by a government against its citizens. Since that time, customary international law has recognized the de-coupling of crimes against humanity from wartime.