The characteristics of crimes against humanity

The concept of crimes against humanity fulfills two roles. On the one hand, it is intended to remedy the loopholes in the international legal system. On the other hand, it constitutes a new kind of crime, that is, a kind of crime that entails characteristics absent from any other sort of crime.

The first loophole that the concept of crimes against humanity was intended to close in the positive international legal system was the one that arose as a result of the impossibility of prosecuting not only a crime committed against the combatants and against the civilian population of the enemies, but also those committed against their own civilian populations. In this way, the concept of crimes against humanity extends the concept of war crimes to include new categories of victims. The second loophole that was supposed to be closed was the impossibility of applying this extension of the humanitarian international law to crimes already committed. The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, which were charged with prosecuting war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Germans and Japanese, respectively, during the Second World War, prosecuted crimes committed before their own institution, that is, before the concept of crimes against humanity arose prior to their own founding, thus injuring the basic legal precept of nulla poena sine lege in favor of the enforcement of a minimal natural law legal framework in international matters.