Although crimes against humanity are as old as humanity, the concept of a definable and judicially
recognised offence has relatively only recently been understood. World War I sore the introduction of
crimes against humanity into International light as the atrocities committed by what was then known
as the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians came to light. This paper aims to delve into past
definitions of crimes against humanity and highlight how it has transformed from a relatively
ambiguous definition into a core concept of International human rights law. Arguably the most
defining feature of the concept’s history is the Nuremberg trials of 1945 in which the United Nations
General Assembly defined a set of principles to guide the judgement of Nazi war criminals charged
from crimes against humanity by an International Military Tribunal. This paper will also argue that
the Jewish Holocaust is classified as a crime against humanity through 21st century and 20th century
interpretation, although the concept’s definition and understanding has shifted throughout the last 80
years the core values remain the same.
The term crimes against humanity were first established during the Nuremberg Trials of the major
Nazi war criminals, thus being understood as a general category of international offence
compromising of forms of persecution and extermination based on racial, religious and political
grounds (Shelton, 2005). Article 6 (c) of the Charter of International Military Tribunal (IMT) defines
the chargeable acts considered crimes against humanity as “…murder, extermination, enslavement,
deportation, and other inhuman acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the
war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any
crime within the jurisdiction of the tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country
perpetrated” (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1945). Following the 1945 trials
the relatively new United Nations began to draft the Convention to Prevent and Punish Genocide.
Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines
genocide as: ‘…genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole
or part, a national, ethical. Racial or religious group, as such by: killing members of the groups,
causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part, imposing measures to prevent births
within the groups, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (Assembly, 1948).