War Crimes and Its Interaction with Crimes against Humanity and Genocide

چکیده مقاله

War crimes are regarded as the first, oldest and most important international crimes. In the contractual field, the ICC Statute, in an ingenious and progressive way, extends the scope of war crimes to non-international armed conflict in addition to international armed conflict, and thus, it can be said that the system of dualism in war crimes has been recognized for the first time. On one hand however, there is no unity of opinion on conceptual framework of war crimes, and on the other hand, there are no provisions, in the aforementioned Statute, about the extent of war crimes and, in general, there is no specific distinction between war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. These affairs have led to a confusion in litigated offences and, ultimately, caused criminal disputes at the international level. The present article seeks to clarify the conceptual scope of war crimes in international criminal law through the mutual analysis of the rules governing the dimensions of war crimes and the similarity/difference aspects of war crimes with crimes against humanity as well as genocide.