Persecution as a War Crime Sample Clauses

Persecution as a War Crime. The most striking difference between Article II(1)(c) and Article II(1)(b) was, of course, that only the crimes against humanity provision criminalized “persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds.” The tribunals nevertheless held that racial and religious persecutions qualified as war crimes when committed in occupied territory. The Ministries tribunal relied on Article 46 of the Hague Regulations – which protected “religious convictions and practice” – to hold that the persecution of Catholic priests from occupied countries was a war crime.80 And the Justice tribunal held in no uncertain terms that atrocities and offenses “amounting to persecution on racial grounds” – a category in which the Tribunal included all acts of persecution against Jews81 – qualified as war crimes “when carried out in occupied territory.”82 No tribunal ever addressed the status of political persecutions in occupied territory, largely because Xxxxxx made a conscious decision to avoid charging defendants with 77 Ministries, XIV TWC 606. 78 See UNWCC HISTORY, 194; Schwelb, in METTRAUX, 131. 79 See, e.g., Xxxxx X. Xxxxx, Prosecuting Wartime Rape and Other Gender-Related Crimes Under International Law: Extraordinary Advances, Enduring Obstacles, 21 BERKELEY J. INT'L L. 288, 301-02 (2003). 80 Ministries, XIV TWC 522. 81 Justice, III TWC 1063. 82 Id. at 1081. political persecution whenever possible83; the only defendant ever convicted of such persecution – Xxxxxxx in the Justice case, discussed below – committed the crime in Germany during the war.84 There is no reason to assume, though, that the Justice tribunal would have treated political persecution any differently than racial persecution; after all, unlike religious freedom, the Hague Regulations did not guarantee either racial integrity or political opinion.85