International Criminal Court in the context of War crimes in the Gaza war

Crimes against humanity are certain crimes committed as part of a large-scale attack against civilians. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war and against a state's own nationals as well as foreign nationals. Together with war crimes, genocide, and the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity are one of the core crimes of international criminal law and, like other crimes against international law, have no temporal or jurisdictional limitations on prosecution (where universal jurisdiction is recognized).

The first prosecution for crimes against humanity took place during the Nuremberg trials and Subsequent Nuremberg trials against defeated leaders of Nazi Germany and collaborators. Crimes against humanity have been prosecuted by other international courts (such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and the International Criminal Court) as well as by domestic courts. The law of crimes against humanity has primarily been developed as a result of the evolution of customary international law. Crimes against humanity are not codified in an international convention, so an international effort to establish such a treaty, led by the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, has been underway since 2008.

The War in Darfur, also nicknamed the Land Cruiser War, was a major armed conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan that began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebel groups began fighting against the government of Sudan, which they accused of oppressing Darfur's non-Arab population. The government responded to attacks by carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Darfur's non-Arabs. This resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the indictment of Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

One side of the conflict is mainly composed of the Sudanese military, police, and the Janjaweed, a Sudanese militia group whose members are mostly recruited among Arabized indigenous Africans and a small number of Bedouin of the northern Rizeigat; the majority of other Arab groups in Darfur remained uninvolved. The other side is made up of rebel groups, notably the SLM/A and the JEM, recruited primarily from the non-Arab Muslim Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit ethnic groups. The African Union and the United Nations also have a joint peacekeeping mission in the region, named UNAMID. Although the Sudanese government publicly denies that it supported the Janjaweed, evidence supports claims that it provided financial assistance and weapons and coordinated joint attacks, many against civilians. Estimates of the number of human casualties range up to several hundred thousand dead, from either combat or starvation and disease. Mass displacements and coercive migrations forced millions into refugee camps or across the border, creating a humanitarian crisis. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell described the situation as a genocide or acts of genocide.

International courts are formed by treaties between nations, or by an international organization such as the United Nations – and include ad hoc tribunals and permanent institutions but exclude any courts arising purely under national authority.

The Libyan Civil War, also known as the First Libyan Civil War and Libyan Revolution, was an armed conflict in 2011 in the North African country of Libya which was fought between forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and rebel groups attempting to oust his government. The war was preceded by protests in Zawiya on 8 August 2009 and finally ignited by protests in Benghazi beginning on 15 February 2011, which led to clashes with security forces who fired on the crowd. The protests escalated into a rebellion spreading across the country, with the forces opposing Gaddafi establishing an interim governing body, the National Transitional Council.

The United Nations Security Council passed an initial resolution on 26 February, freezing the assets of Gaddafi and his inner circle and restricting their travel, and referred the matter to the International Criminal Court for investigation. In early March, Gaddafi's forces rallied, pushed eastwards and re-took several coastal cities before reaching Benghazi. A further UN resolution authorised member states to establish and enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, and to use "all necessary measures" to prevent attacks on civilians, which turned into a bombing campaign by the forces of NATO against Libyan military installations and vehicles. The Gaddafi government then announced a ceasefire, but fighting and bombing continued. Throughout the conflict, rebels rejected government offers of a ceasefire and efforts by the African Union to end the fighting because the plans set forth did not include the removal of Gaddafi.

International criminal law (ICL) is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetration. The core crimes under international law are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.

Classical international law governs the relationships, rights, and responsibilities of states. After World War II, the Charter of the International Military Tribunal and the following Nuremberg trial revolutionized international law by applying its prohibitions directly to individuals, in this case the defeated leaders of Nazi Germany, thus inventing international criminal law. After being dormant for decades, international criminal law was revived in the 1990s to address the war crimes in the Yugoslav Wars and the Rwandan genocide, leading to the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court in 2001.

An atrocity crime is a violation of international criminal law that falls under the historically three legally defined international crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Ethnic cleansing is widely regarded as a fourth mass atrocity crime by legal scholars and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the field, despite not yet being recognized as an independent crime under international law.

Crimes of aggression are considered by some to be mass atrocity crimes and they are included in the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. However, most legal scholars do not consider them to be mass atrocity crimes. While it is certainly a grave violation of international law and frequently the context in which mass atrocity crimes are committed, the crime of aggression is distinguishable because it is an attack on the territory, sovereignty, or political independence of a state rather than on individuals.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). It was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome, Italy on 17 July 1998 and it entered into force on 1 July 2002. As of January 2025, 125 states are party to the statute. Among other things, it establishes court function, jurisdiction and structure.

The Rome Statute established four core international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Those crimes "shall not be subject to any statute of limitations." Under the Rome Statute, the ICC can only investigate and prosecute the four core international crimes in situations where states are "unable" or "unwilling" to do so themselves. The provisions on the crime of aggression did not take effect until after it was defined at the 2010 Kampala Conference.

In 1956, the Gaza Strip came under military occupation by Israel for a period of four months during the Suez Crisis. Israel captured it again on 6 June 1967 after the Six Day War. The United Nations, international human rights organizations, International Court of Justice, European Union, International Criminal Court, most of the international community and most legal academics and experts regard the Gaza Strip to still be under military occupation by Israel, as Israel still maintains direct control over Gaza's air and maritime space, six of Gaza's seven land crossings, a no-go buffer zone within the territory, and the Palestinian population registry. Israel, the United States, and other legal, military, and foreign policy experts otherwise contend that Israel "ceded the effective control needed under the legal definition of occupation" upon its disengagement in 2005. Israel continues to maintain a blockade of the Gaza Strip, limiting the movement of goods and people in and out of the Gaza Strip.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan face severe challenges not experienced by non-LGBTQ residents. Afghan members of the LGBTQ community are forced to keep their gender identity and sexual orientation secret, in fear of violence and the death penalty. The religious nature of the country has limited any opportunity for public discussion, with any mention of homosexuality and related terms deemed taboo.

On 23 January 2025, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Ahmad Khan, requested arrest warrants against Taliban leaders Hibatullah Akhundzada and Abdul Hakim Haqqani for their persecution of women, girls, and the LGBTQ community, marking the first time the court has recognized crimes against the LGBTQ community.

Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir (born 1 January 1944) is a Sudanese former military officer and politician who served as Sudan's head of state under various titles from 1989 until 2019, when he was deposed in a coup d'état. He was subsequently imprisoned, tried and convicted on multiple corruption charges.

Al-Bashir came to power in 1989 when, as a brigadier general in the Sudanese Army, he led a group of officers in a military coup that ousted the democratically elected government of prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi after it began negotiations with rebels in the south; he subsequently replaced President Ahmed al-Mirghani as head of state. He was elected three times as president in elections that have been under scrutiny for electoral fraud. In 1998, al-Bashir founded the National Congress Party, which remained the dominant political party in the country until 2019. In March 2009, al-Bashir became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), for allegedly directing a campaign of mass killing, rape, and pillage against civilians in Darfur. On 11 February 2020, the Government of Sudan announced that it had agreed to hand over al-Bashir to the ICC for trial.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1970 was a measure adopted unanimously by the UN Security Council on 26 February 2011. It condemned the use of lethal force by the government of Muammar Gaddafi against protesters participating in the Libyan Civil War, and imposed a series of international sanctions in response.

The Security Council resolution marked the first time a country was unanimously referred to the International Criminal Court by the council.

The doctrine of common purpose, common design, joint enterprise, joint criminal enterprise or parasitic accessory liability is a common law legal doctrine that imputes criminal liability to the participants in a criminal enterprise for all reasonable results from that enterprise. The common purpose doctrine was established in English law, and later adopted in other common-law jurisdictions including Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, the Solomon Islands, Texas, the International Criminal Court, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Common design also applies in the law of tort. It is a different legal test from that which applies in the criminal law. The difference between common designs in the criminal law and the civil law was illustrated in NCB v Gamble [1959] 1 QB 11 at 23, by Devlin LJ:

Forced prostitution, also known as involuntary prostitution or compulsory prostitution, is prostitution or sexual slavery that takes place as a result of coercion by a third party. The terms "forced prostitution" or "enforced prostitution" appear in international and humanitarian conventions, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but have been inconsistently applied. "Forced prostitution" refers to conditions of control over a person who is coerced by another to engage in sexual activity.

In the practice of international law, command responsibility (also superior responsibility) is the legal doctrine of hierarchical accountability for war crimes, whereby a commanding officer (military) and a superior officer (civil) are legally responsible for the war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed by their subordinates; thus, a commanding officer always is accountable for the acts of commission and the acts of omission of their soldiers.

In the late 19th century, the legal doctrine of command responsibility was codified in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which are partly based upon the Lieber Code (General Orders No. 100, 24 April 1863), military law that legally allowed the Union Army to fight in the regular and the irregular modes of warfare deployed by the Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861–1865). As international law, the legal doctrine and the term command responsibility were applied and used in the Leipzig war crimes trials (1921) that included the trial of Captain Emil Müller for prisoner abuse committed by his soldiers during the First World War (1914–1918).

The Rohingya people (/roʊˈhɪndʒə, -ɪŋjə/; Rohingya: 𐴌𐴗𐴥𐴝𐴙𐴚𐴒𐴙𐴝, romanized: ruáingga; IPA: [rʊˈɜi̯ɲ.ɟə]) are a stateless Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group who predominantly follow Islam from Rakhine State, Myanmar. Before the Rohingya genocide in 2017, when over 740,000 fled to Bangladesh, an estimated of 1.4 million Rohingya lived in Myanmar. One of the most persecuted minorities in the world, the Rohingya are denied citizenship under the 1982 Myanmar nationality law. There are also restrictions on their freedom of movement, access to state education and civil service jobs. The legal conditions faced by the Rohingya in Myanmar have been compared to apartheid by some academics, analysts and political figures, including Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, a South African anti-apartheid activist. The most recent mass displacement of Rohingya in 2017 prompted the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against humanity, and the International Court of Justice to hear a case alleging genocide.

The Rohingya maintain they are indigenous to western Myanmar with a heritage of over a millennium and influence from the Arabs, Mughals, and Portuguese. The community claims descent from populations in both precolonial Arakan and colonial Arakan; historically, the region was an independent kingdom situated between Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The Myanmar government considers the Rohingya as British colonial and postcolonial migrants from Chittagong in Bangladesh. It argues that a distinct precolonial Muslim population is recognised as Kaman, and that the Rohingya conflate their history with the history of Arakan Muslims in general to advance a separatist agenda. In addition, Myanmar's government does not recognise the term "Rohingya" and prefers to refer to the community as "Bengali". Rohingya campaign groups and human rights organisations demand the right to "self-determination within Myanmar".