War Crimes And Crimes Against Humanity Essay

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The context in which war crimes and crimes against humanity are committed The systematic persecution of one racial group by another, such as occurred during the South African apartheid government, was recognized as a crime against humanity by the United Nations General Assembly in 1976. The intentional attempt by a government to establish and maintain domination by one race of persons over another race, known as apartheid, is conducted on a national level and usually affects just the citizens of the state where it is being practiced. But it reaches the level of an international crime because it transforms an intranational act or condition into a situation deemed offensive by international standards. Apartheid contravenes the presumptions that all persons are born free and equal in dignity and are entitled to certain fundamental human rights and freedoms as set out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The unlawfulness of apartheid is affirmed…show more content…
As the war in Europe was ending, the Allied governments agreed that it was necessary to punish those persons responsible for these atrocities. They set up an international military tribunal in the German city of Nuremberg and conducted trials of high-level German officials after the war. Prosecution of the Nazis represented an unprecedented effort to punish people accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The 1990s were the most significant decade for the development of international criminal law since the 1940s, in which two episodes were of particular importance. The first was a civil war lasting from 1991 to 1995, costing more than 120,000 lives, and resulting in the emergence of several new States on the territory of what had been the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, a series of wars lead to the dissolution of the

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