The Concept Of Crimes Against Humanity — When Harm To One Is Harm To All

To understand what Nuremberg accomplished, you have to understand the void it filled.

Before 1945, international law was essentially a system of agreements between sovereign states. States could sign treaties with each other about trade, borders, and the conduct of war. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 set rules for how nations could fight each other. But the underlying assumption was absolute: what a government did to its own people was its own business. There was no legal concept that said the international community had standing to intervene in a state's treatment of its own citizens.

The closest predecessor was the 1915 joint declaration by France, Great Britain, and Russia condemning the Ottoman Empire's massacres of Armenians as "crimes against civilization and humanity." This was the first time the phrase appeared in a diplomatic context. But it had no legal force. It was a moral condemnation, not a prosecutable charge. The Ottoman leaders who ordered the massacres were never tried. The Treaty of Sevres (1920) included provisions for prosecution, but the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) replaced it and granted amnesty. The precedent was clear: you could condemn atrocities, but you couldn't prosecute them.

The inter-war period saw attempts to codify international criminal law. Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin — who would later coin the word "genocide" — lobbied the League of Nations in the 1930s to create legal mechanisms for prosecuting state-sponsored mass violence. He was politely ignored. The prevailing legal orthodoxy, articulated clearly by thinkers like Carl Schmitt, held that sovereignty was the highest legal principle and that any external interference in a state's domestic affairs was illegitimate.

The Holocaust shattered that orthodoxy. When the Allied forces liberated the concentration camps in 1945 and the scope of what had been done became undeniable — six million Jews murdered, along with Roma, disabled people, political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet POWs — the existing legal framework had nothing to offer. What the Nazis did was legal under German law. They had passed the Nuremberg Laws. They had built the bureaucratic and legal architecture for extermination. If sovereignty was absolute, there was no basis for prosecution.

The London Charter of August 8, 1945 — signed by the US, UK, Soviet Union, and France — established the International Military Tribunal and defined three categories of crimes: crimes against peace (planning and waging aggressive war), war crimes (violations of the laws of war), and crimes against humanity.

Article 6(c) of the London Charter defined crimes against humanity as: "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds."

The innovation was in that phrase "against any civilian population." This was not about what one army did to another. This was about what a government did to civilians — including its own. For the first time in legal history, a tribunal claimed jurisdiction over acts committed by a state against its own people.

The defendants' lawyers raised the obvious objection: nullum crimen sine lege — no crime without a pre-existing law. You can't prosecute someone for violating a law that didn't exist when they committed the act. The tribunal rejected this argument, holding that the acts in question were so manifestly immoral that perpetrators could not have been unaware of their wrongfulness, regardless of what domestic law permitted.

This was a philosophically audacious move. The tribunal was asserting that there is a moral law above positive law. That certain acts are wrong by their nature, not merely because a statute says so. That was essentially a natural law argument — the idea that some moral truths are universal and self-evident.

The Nuremberg trials convicted twelve defendants and sentenced ten to death. Hermann Goering poisoned himself before execution. The trials were imperfect — they were victor's justice in many respects, and the Allied powers' own atrocities (the firebombing of Dresden, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet deportation of entire ethnic groups) were excluded from the proceedings. The criticism is legitimate and well-documented.

But the legal principle survived the imperfections of its first application. And that principle — that there are acts so severe they injure all of humanity — became the foundation of everything that followed.

The road from Nuremberg to a permanent international criminal court took over fifty years. The Cold War froze progress. The UN International Law Commission drafted statutes for a permanent court in the 1950s, but the US and Soviet Union had no interest in an institution that might scrutinize their own conduct.

The thaw came in the 1990s, driven by two events that made the need undeniable. In 1994, roughly 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were murdered in Rwanda over approximately 100 days. In 1995, Bosnian Serb forces massacred over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica — the worst mass atrocity in Europe since the Holocaust. Ad hoc tribunals were established for both (the ICTR and ICTY), but the need for a permanent court became politically unavoidable.

In July 1998, 120 states adopted the Rome Statute in a conference that had the US, China, and Israel voting against it. The statute entered into force on July 1, 2002, after 60 ratifications. The International Criminal Court was born — the first permanent international tribunal with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.

The Rome Statute's definition of crimes against humanity (Article 7) is precise. It lists eleven specific acts — murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible transfer, imprisonment, torture, sexual violence (including rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced sterilization), persecution on political/racial/national/ethnic/cultural/religious/gender grounds, enforced disappearance, apartheid, and other inhumane acts of a similar character. These acts must be committed as part of a "widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack."

Each word in that definition was negotiated for months. "Widespread or systematic" — the disjunctive "or" matters. An attack doesn't need to be both widespread and systematic. A single systematic campaign against a small group can qualify. "Directed against any civilian population" — this excludes random or isolated acts. There must be a policy or pattern. "With knowledge of the attack" — the perpetrator must know their acts are part of a broader campaign. This prevents the defense of "I was just following orders without understanding the context."

Each crime on the Rome Statute's list encodes a philosophical claim about what it means to be human.

Genocide. The term was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, combining the Greek genos (race, tribe) with the Latin -cide (killing). The Genocide Convention of 1948 defines it as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The key word is "intent." Genocide requires the specific intent to destroy a group as such — not just to kill individuals, but to erase a category of people from existence. This makes genocide the most extreme assertion of "un-humanity" possible: the claim that an entire group of people should not exist.

Torture. The prohibition on torture asserts that every human body has a dignity that cannot be overridden by state interest. The Rome Statute defines it as the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person in the custody or control of the accused. The UN Convention Against Torture (1984) adds that it must be for a purpose — extracting information, punishment, intimidation, or discrimination. What torture violates isn't just a person's physical integrity. It violates the principle that a human being is never merely an instrument to be used.

Enforced disappearance. This crime — the arrest, detention, or abduction of persons by state agents, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty — was codified partly in response to the "dirty wars" in Argentina, Chile, and other Latin American countries in the 1970s and 1980s, where an estimated 30,000 people in Argentina alone were "disappeared" by the military junta. The crime recognizes that erasing a person's legal existence — making them vanish without a trace, denying families any information — is an assault on the basic human need to be acknowledged as real.

Apartheid. The crime of apartheid was codified in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, and carried into the Rome Statute. It's defined as inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention of maintaining that regime. This codifies the principle that systematically building a society on racial domination is not a domestic policy choice — it's a crime that injures everyone.

Persecution. This is the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity. Persecution is the broadest category — it encompasses any deliberate targeting of a group on the basis of political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, or gender identity. It asserts that group-targeted oppression is not an internal matter but a planetary concern.

Here is where honesty requires a harder look.

As of 2025, 124 states are parties to the Rome Statute. Notable non-parties include the United States, China, Russia, India, and Israel — collectively home to roughly half the world's population and four of the five permanent UN Security Council members.

The ICC has opened formal investigations in roughly a dozen situations, predominantly in Africa — Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Darfur, Kenya, Libya, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Georgia, Burundi, Bangladesh/Myanmar, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Ukraine. The African Union has repeatedly accused the court of institutional bias. In 2016, South Africa, Burundi, and The Gambia announced plans to withdraw (Burundi followed through; the others reversed course).

The court has secured relatively few convictions. Thomas Lubanga (DRC, conscripting child soldiers), Bosco Ntaganda (DRC, war crimes and crimes against humanity), Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi (Mali, destruction of cultural heritage), and Dominic Ongwen (Uganda, crimes against humanity) are among the completed cases. Omar al-Bashir, the former president of Sudan indicted for genocide in Darfur, traveled freely to ICC member states for years without being arrested. Vladimir Putin has an ICC arrest warrant for the deportation of Ukrainian children, but no mechanism exists to enforce it against a nuclear-armed head of state.

The enforcement gap is real and it matters. But it's worth distinguishing between two different critiques. One critique says the ICC is a flawed instrument that needs reform — better funding, universal jurisdiction, a more equitable prosecutorial focus. The other critique says the entire concept of international criminal accountability is illegitimate — that sovereignty should remain absolute and no external body should judge a state's internal conduct.

The first critique is operational and constructive. The second is a regression to the pre-Nuremberg void. The fact that nearly every state — including those that refuse ICC jurisdiction — formally endorses the principle that crimes against humanity exist suggests the second critique has lost the argument at the level of declared norms, even if it wins many battles at the level of enforcement.

The concept of crimes against humanity does something no other legal framework does: it treats shared humanity as a legally protectable interest. Not metaphorically. Not aspirationally. As a matter of enforceable law.

When we say "crimes against humanity," we are saying: there is a thing called humanity. It is shared by every person. It can be injured. When it is injured — even in a place you've never been, to people you've never met, in a conflict you don't understand — you are a victim. You have standing. The harm reaches you.

This is Law 1 in legal code. The premise of this entire book — that if every person said yes, we could solve our species-level problems — rests on the claim that shared humanity is real. The concept of crimes against humanity is the strongest evidence that this claim has already been accepted into the operating system of civilization. We wrote it down. We built institutions around it. We prosecute violations of it, imperfectly and selectively, but we prosecute them.

The gap between the principle and its enforcement is where the work is. But the principle is no longer in question. No government on Earth officially argues that genocide is permissible. No head of state publicly defends torture as a right of sovereignty. No legal system endorses apartheid. The moral baseline has been set.

What remains is making the enforcement match the principle. That's a political engineering problem, not a philosophical one. The philosophy is settled. Harm to one is harm to all. The law already says so.

1. The Standing Question. Think of a specific ongoing atrocity or systematic persecution happening right now, anywhere in the world. Ask yourself: in what concrete way does this harm me? Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. In what way does the existence of this act degrade the concept of shared humanity that I depend on for my own dignity? Write your answer. If you can't find one, write about why that is.

2. The Selectivity Audit. List three atrocities that have received significant international attention and three that have received very little. What determines which crimes against humanity get prosecuted and which get ignored? What patterns do you see in terms of the power and geopolitical alignment of the perpetrating state? What would an honest, non-selective enforcement system look like?

3. The Sovereignty Tension. Steel-man the argument that national sovereignty should be absolute and that no external body should have jurisdiction over what a government does to its own people. Then dismantle it. Where does the argument break? At what point does sovereignty become complicity?

4. The Proximity Test. The concept of crimes against humanity asserts that geographic distance is irrelevant — that harm in one place injures everyone everywhere. Test this against your own behavior. How much of your political attention, your charitable giving, your advocacy is directed at atrocities in places geographically or culturally distant from you? What would it look like to actually behave as though harm to one is harm to all?

5. The Future Crimes List. The Rome Statute's list of crimes against humanity was negotiated in the 1990s. What acts are currently legal or tolerated that you believe future generations will classify as crimes against humanity? Mass incarceration? Factory farming? Climate destruction? Algorithmic discrimination? Write the case for adding one specific act to the list, using the Rome Statute's framework.