According to the received view crimes like torture, rape, enslavement or enforced prostitution are domestic crimes if they are committed as isolated or sporadic events, but become crimes against humanity when they are committed as part of a ‘widespread or systematic attack’ against a civilian population. Only in the latter case can these crimes be prosecuted by the international community. One of the most influential accounts of this idea is Larry May’s International Harm Principle, which states that crimes against humanity (...) are those that somehow ‘harm humanity.’ I argue that this principle is unable to provide an adequate account of crimes against humanity. Moreover, I argue that the principle fails to account for the idea that crimes against humanity are necessarily group based. I conclude by suggesting that the problem with May’s account is that it relies on a harm-based conception of crime which is very popular, but ultimately mistaken. I submit that in order to develop an adequate theory of crimes against humanity we need to abandon the harm-based model and replace it with an alternative conception of crime and criminal law, one based on the notion of accountability. (shrink)

This article presents a philosophical account of the nature of crime. It argues that the criminal law contains both fault-based crimes and strict liability offences, and that these two represent different paradigms of liability. It goes on to argue that the gist of fault-based crimes lies in their being public wrongs, not (as is often thought) because they wrong the public, but because the public is responsible for punishing them, i.e. because they merit state punishment. What makes wrongs deserving of (...) punishment is that they are seriously blameworthy, inasmuch as they evince a disrespect for the values violated. But they only merit state punishment when they violate important values, not simply due to the well-known pragmatic considerations against the use of the criminal law, but to the intrinsic expressive force of criminal conviction. Finally, the analysis of fault-based crimes points to a role for strict liability in regulating actions that are not seriously blameworthy but do increase the risk of values being damaged. (shrink)

The answer I offer in this Article is that crimes against humanity assault one particular aspect of human being, namely our character as political animals. We are creatures whose nature compels us to live socially, but who cannot do so without artificial political organization that inevitably poses threats to our well-being, and, at the limit, to our very survival. Crimes against humanity represent the worst of those threats; they are the limiting case of politics gone cancerous. Precisely because we cannot (...) live without politics, we exist under the permanent threat that politics will turn cancerous and the indispensable institutions of organized political life will destroy us. That is why all humankind shares an interest in repressing these crimes. The theory that I aim to defend here consists of two propositions: that "humanity" in the label "crimes against humanity" refers to our nature as political animals, and that these crimes pose a universal threat that all humankind shares an interest in repressing. (shrink)