Crimes Against Humanity: Definition and the Link to Human Dignity

What the Rome Statute says

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted in Rome in 1998, defines crimes against humanity in Article 7: a list of acts — murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, unlawful imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, persecution, enforced disappearance, apartheid, and other inhumane acts causing great suffering — that become a crime against humanity only under one precise condition. The act must be part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, committed with knowledge of the attack. It’s this requirement, not the severity of the single act, that separates a crime against humanity from an ordinary crime: an isolated murder is still a murder; the same act, repeated on a large scale or carried out under an organized plan against civilians, moves into a different legal category.

The Statute also spells out some of the acts on that list. Extermination includes imposing conditions of life calculated to destroy part of a population. Persecution means the severe, intentional deprivation of fundamental rights. Enforced disappearance is the arrest or detention of a person followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of their liberty. These are technical, court-facing definitions, not loose descriptions.

Where genocide and war crimes begin

The three offenses are often mixed up, but the Rome Statute keeps them apart: each one turns on a different requirement.

Genocide, defined by the 1948 Convention, requires an element crimes against humanity lack: the specific intent to eliminate a group defined by its national, ethnic, racial, or religious identity. Crimes against humanity, by contrast, target a civilian population without the perpetrator needing to want to destroy a group as such — a widespread or systematic attack is enough. War crimes, finally, exist only where an armed conflict is under way: they are violations of the rules that conflict is supposed to follow, a theme that also runs through our Recap on World War 2.

From Nuremberg to the International Criminal Court

The phrase “crimes against humanity” didn’t start with the International Criminal Court. It first appears in the London Charter of August 8, 1945, the act that created the Nuremberg international military tribunal. The trial of Nazi leaders opened on November 20, 1945, and closed on October 1, 1946: of the defendants, three were acquitted, nineteen convicted, twelve of them sentenced to death. It was the first tribunal to formally try this category of crime, defined at the time as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, or inhumane treatment of civilians, plus persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds.

From that trial to the International Criminal Court lie one treaty and several decades. In 1998, states meeting in Rome adopted the Statute that gave crimes against humanity — alongside genocide, war crimes, and aggression — a permanent court, instead of tribunals set up case by case as at Nuremberg. The Court became operational in 2002, when the Statute entered into force, and issued its first conviction in 2012, in the case of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo.

Practical example: someone accused of ordering the systematic deportation of civilians from a region, as part of an organized policy, can be tried either by a national court or, if the state won’t or can’t prosecute, by the International Criminal Court — the same route, through a different court, that the Nuremberg judges took in 1945.

The principle of human dignity

Italy’s constitution, in Article 3, states that “all citizens hold equal social dignity and are equal before the law, regardless of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, or personal and social condition.” It’s a principle that the bodies of the Italian state apply and protect every day, from Parliament to the judiciary, and one described in full on our page about the structure of the Italian constitution.

Article 3 doesn’t name crimes against humanity: it’s our own reading, not the text of the law, that puts the two on the same plane. Here’s the reading we propose: the crimes against humanity listed in the Rome Statute — extermination, persecution, enforced disappearance — are each, in their own way, the most radical denial of the equal social dignity that Article 3 sets out as a principle. It isn’t a link written into any statute: it’s a way of understanding why international criminal law treats these acts as a category apart from ordinary crime. The very definition of a legal norm also helps explain why the Rome Statute, though a treaty between states rather than domestic law, works in a similar way: it sets a general, abstract rule, binding on anyone who falls under the Court’s jurisdiction.