Crimes against humanity are certain serious crimes committed as part of a large-scale attack against civilians. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war and against a state's own nationals as well as foreign nationals. Together with war crimes, genocide, and the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity are one of the core crimes of international criminal law, and like other crimes against international law have no temporal or jurisdictional limitations on prosecution.
In 1915, the Armenian genocide (pictured) was officially condemned as a "crime against humanity" by Russia, France, and the United Kingdom.
Leopold II, King of the Belgians and de facto owner of the Congo Free State, whose agents were accused of crimes against humanity
Nuremberg Trials. The defendants are in the dock. The main target of the prosecution was Hermann Göring (at the left edge on the first row of benches), considered to be the most important surviving official in the Third Reich after Hitler's death.
The defendants at the Tokyo International Tribunal. General Hideki Tojo was one of the main defendants and is in the centre of the middle row.
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
A U.S. soldier observing victims of the Malmedy massacre (17 December 1944), where 84 U.S. prisoners of war were murdered by the Waffen-SS in Belgium
A ditch full of the bodies of Chinese civilians killed by Japanese soldiers in Suzhou, China, 1938
HRW wrote that the Saudi Arabian-led military intervention in Yemen that began on March 26, 2015, involved airstrikes in apparent violation of the laws of war.
Bodies of some of the hundreds of Vietnamese villagers who were killed by U.S. soldiers during the My Lai Massacre
