A war crime, in the technical legal sense of a punishable offense, is a grave breach of international and customary law relating to warfare and armed conflict. It may involve “grave breaches” of the 1949 Geneva Conventions or their first 1977 Additional Protocol, but also a wide range of other misbehavior, including rape, torture, murder, indiscriminate attacks on civilians, and the willful destruction or appropriation of property not justified by military necessity.
Most States have criminal statutes that incorporate the Rome Statute’s definition of a war crime or proscribe offenses defined by customary international law (e.g., Rule 156). Such laws generally recognize that not only traditional international armed conflicts are subject to prosecution for such crimes but also certain forms of non-international armed conflict.
When a service member is charged, prosecuted, and found guilty of conduct formally classified as a war crime by a legitimate governing authority (like an international tribunal, military commission, or national court), it sends a powerful signal to other members of the same force that such behavior is unforgivable and inexcusable. However, such prosecutions are notoriously difficult to come by, and, even when they do occur, they are often highly complicated.
As a result, the term “war crime” tends to have a number of evocative connotations. It can trigger hyper-condemnation, or even outright dehumanization, of the accused in some quarters. It can also be susceptible to what logicians call sanitization, in which the word is used so often that it loses its meaning.
