Context: Recently, the International Criminal Court has announced that it will open an investigation into possible war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine. Amnesty International said Russia’s military was conducting “indiscriminate attacks” in Ukraine.

About War Crime

• War crimes are defined as serious violations of humanitarian laws during a conflict. 
• The definition, established by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is derived from the 1949 Geneva Conventions and is based on the idea that individuals can be held liable for the actions of a state or its military.
• There is a long list of acts that can be considered war crimes.
• The taking of hostages, willful killings, torture or inhuman treatment of prisoners of war, and forcing children to fight are some of the more obvious examples.

Principles of War Crime

To decide whether an individual or a military has committed a war crime, international humanitarian law lays down three principles: distinction, proportionality and precaution.

• Proportionality prohibits armies from responding to an attack with excessive violence. If a soldier is killed, for example, you cannot bomb an entire city in retaliation.
• It is also illegal to target objectives that are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objectives, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Precaution requires parties to a conflict to avoid or minimize the harm done to the civilian population.

Finally, the principle of distinction says that you have to be constantly trying to distinguish between civilian and belligerent populations and objects.

• For example, attacking a barrack where there are people who have said they no longer participate in the conflict can be a war crime. “The same goes for bombing a military base where there are generators that supply hospitals with electricity.”
• Civilian and military populations have become increasingly hard to distinguish.

Do war crimes constitute to genocides?

• The UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect separates war crimes from genocide and crimes against humanity.
• War crimes are defined as occurring in a domestic conflict or a war between two states.
• However, genocide and crimes against humanity can happen in peacetime or during the unilateral aggression of a military towards a group of unarmed people.