Human Rights & International Law: An Introduction
The international legal provisions on war crimes and crimes against humanity have been approved and developed within the framework of international humanitarian law, or the law of armed conflict, a special branch of international law which has its own distinctiveness and which has gone through a deep period of growth, evolution and consolidation in the last 50 years.
The rules of humanitarian law concerning international crimes and responsibility have not always developed satisfactorily clear. One of the thorniest problems is that relating to the legal nature of international crimes committed by individuals and considered as serious violations of the rules of humanitarian law (Bassiouni, 1973; Sperduti, 1988) with regard to the traditional tripartition i.e. crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Certainly, the world at the moment is threatened by a disconcerting rise of conflicts which are no longer international in nature (Meron, 1995), as was conventionally the case, and in which the basic problem regarding the categorization of offences seems to be that the standard between war crimes and crimes against humanity appears unclear. Moreover, both types of crime, accompanied by the crime of genocide, come under the broader concept of crimina juris gentium. The category of crimes against peace has been left aside as its scope is more vague and the particular features it presents imply a close connection with jus ad bellum issues.
The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1929 Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War had no provisions on the punishment of individuals who violated their rules (Scott, 1915). Only the 1929 Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the Field had a rather weak provision in Article 30. The...........
