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What’s the difference between a war crime, a crime against humanity, and genocide?
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Rudolf Hess Radovan Karadzic sits in a courtroom in The Hague, with a uniformed guard in the background. Srebrenica genocide
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Rudolf Hess
Rudolf Hess The deputy leader of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess, was found guilty of war crimes at the postwar Nuremberg trials and sentenced to life in prison.

What’s the difference between a war crime, a crime against humanity, and genocide?

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Brian Duignan
Brian Duignan is a senior editor at EncyclopĂŠdia Britannica. His subject areas include philosophy, law, social science, politics, political theory, and religion.
Brian Duignan
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Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
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Each of these very serious crimes is officially defined under the Rome Statute of 1998, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a permanent tribunal to investigate and try individuals charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and acts of criminal aggression. Similarly defined crimes had been prosecuted during the postwar trials in Nuremberg (1945–46) and Tokyo (1946–48).

What is a war crime?

As defined in the Rome Statute, a war crime is any “grave” breach of the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 (as amended in 1977), which prohibits the mistreatment of combatants and prisoners of war and requires the amelioration of those who are wounded or sick; it also forbids attacks upon or the abuse of civilians. Additional war crimes under the Rome Statute include intentionally attacking civilian populations; civilian towns and villages; civilian buildings such as churches, schools, and hospitals; and personnel or vehicles conducting humanitarian assistance for civilians.

What is a crime against humanity?

Radovan Karadzic sits in a courtroom in The Hague, with a uniformed guard in the background.
Radovan KaradĆŸićBosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan KaradĆŸić awaiting the reading of the verdict at his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, The Hague, Netherlands, March 24, 2016. KaradĆŸić was found guilty on 10 of 11 counts, including responsibility for genocide committed in Srebrenica in 1995.

As defined in the Rome Statute, a crime against humanity is any of about a dozen acts performed in the course of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.” They include murder and “extermination,” or mass murder; enslavement; torture; rape and “any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity”; and apartheid. Notably, extermination is understood to encompass “the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population.”

What is genocide?

Srebrenica genocide
Srebrenica genocideCoffins containing the recovered remains of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, July 2008.

As defined in the Rome Statute, genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” whether “in whole or in part,” because of its nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. Such horrendous crimes often involve mass murder but may also consist of “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”; “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”; “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”; or greatly damaging the group’s conditions of life. Given that genocide involves mass murder and the destruction of life, including the elimination of access to food and medicine, its definition in the Rome Statute overlaps to some extent with the broader definition of crimes against humanity. The primary distinction between the two is that genocide is necessarily committed with the intent to destroy a group (or groups) of a certain identity, whereas crimes against humanity need not be committed with any particular intent.

As noted above, the International Criminal Court is authorized under the Rome Statute to prosecute acts of criminal aggression as well as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Criminal aggression involves “the planning, preparation, initiation or execution” of an act of aggression, which itself consists of “the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State.”

Brian Duignan