Crime counters humanity

           Crime counters humanity

crime counters humanity, category of criminal infringements including the assassination, the extermination, the reduction in slavery, the deportation and any other inhuman act made against any civil population before or during the war, as well as persecutions for political, racial reasons or monk  —whom these acts or persecutions constituted or not a violation of the national law of the country where they were perpetrated.

This definition was given by article 6, subparagraph C, of the statute of the court of Nuremberg, the international military tribunal charged to judge the criminals of the Second World war, in Europe (see  War crimes). In Asia, the agreement of London of August 8, 1945 instituted a court in Tokyo, which was charged to judge the criminals of the Far East.

The definition perduré in spite of the disappearance of the two jurisdictions and was taken again, with some modifications, in several International Conventions (conventions of the United Nations of December 9, 1948 and December 26, 1968).

One distinguishes the crimes against humanity from the war crimes and the crimes against peace, also definite during the agreement of London of 1945. The crimes against peace are consisted the direction, the release or the continuation of a war of aggression, in violation of the treaties or international agreements. The war crimes correspond to the violation of the laws and the habits of the war. Thus, are prohibited the assassination, the ill treatments and the deportations for forced work  —or any other goal — of the civil populations in the occupied territories, the assassination or the ill treatments of the prisoners of war, the plundering of the public and deprived goods (see  Guerre). The prohibition of the crimes against peace had been stated already in the pact of the Company of the Nations and in the Briand-Kellog pact of August 27, 1928. The prohibition of the war crimes as for it was contained in conventions of the Hague of 1899 and 1907. However, no penal sanction was envisaged in the event of violation of these international prohibitions.

The repression of the crimes against humanity is organized in a very different way according to whether an international jurisdiction or a national jurisdiction of it is charged. The courts of Nuremberg and Tokyo were created especially to judge and punish the criminals of the Second World war and disappeared at the same time as their mission was completed. However, of new organizations were instituted since: the establishment of the international penal Tribunal (TPI) of the Hague, decided within the framework of UNO (resolution 827 of the Security Council of May 25, 1993), answers the same requirement to judge the war criminals, but this time in ex-Yugoslavia. The statute of each one of these ad hoc  courts  (created for the circumstance only) envisages the crimes and the sanctions which the court will have to judge and determines the procedure which will be followed before the Court. The States must then accept, not only the jurisdiction of the Court, i.e. the competence and the authority of its decisions, but also to cooperate with the international court in order to deliver the defendants. This poses many problems of national sovereignty and international police force and supposes that each State adopts a law organizing the dispossession of its own penal legal system to the profit of the international authority.

There is not permanent international penal jurisdiction which would be competent to judge the authors of the crimes against odious humanity and another crimes for the human conscience, in spite of the many elaborate projects either at the international level or at the European level. Consequently, it returns to the national laws to envisage the methods of repression of these crimes. In France, the new French Penal code organizes from now on the repression of these crimes, thus supplementing the decisions of the Court of cassation, elaborate at the time of the businesses Barbie and Touvier.The French right applies, indeed, the rule of the principle of the imprescribility of the crimes against humanity, which means that supposed guilty can be translated into justice without no time being able to cancel the right to the action at law, even very a long time after the accused facts. The imprescribility is exceptional in French right and does not concern, moreover, that the crimes against humanity. All the infringements, even criminal, of the criminal law are prescriptible. This is why the distinction with the war crimes is essential, because the war crimes are subjected to the normal regulation of the criminal law. Gravity out of the commun run of the crime against humanity allows also the implementation of derogatory processes compared to the French general criminal law. Thus, the Supreme court of appeal admitted that the arrest of Klaus Barbie was regular, in spite of the very particular conditions of its expulsion of Bolivia towards France (stop of October 6, 1983). Moreover, the defendant of crime against humanity cannot defend himself to have acted as conformity with the law in force in the country where the facts were made and at the time when they were made, because that does not allow the exemption of the penal responsibility for the infringements made by the defendant, who he was a simple executant or a leader. These exemptions are justified by the world recognition of a kind of natural justice penal, commune with very whole humanity, which authorizes a more severe repression.