The Conceptual Poverty of “Crimes Against Humanity”

There is something troubling about all the words that have been spilled over the question of whether Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine constitutes “genocide” or merely “crimes against humanity.” The suffering of tens of millions of Ukrainians who have been killed, wounded, displaced, traumatized, and economically ruined will not be made more or less by what we call the Russian assault on their country.

Still, the discussion seems unavoidable, if only in view of the unlikely prospect that some of those responsible will one day be brought to justice and have to be served with an indictment. Should that ever happen, genocide, defined by Article II of the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial, or religious group,” would be the clearer concept. Yet there is no real evidence that such has been the Russian intention in Ukraine. Although the actual figure can be assumed to be higher, the estimated number of Ukrainian civilian deaths in the war so far, as released at the end of May by the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, was 4,149—roughly one-hundredth of 1 percent of the pre-war Ukrainian population. What has happened is horrifying, but it isn’t genocide.

“Crimes against humanity,” then? These are said by the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to be “acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population” that include “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, persecution on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, or religious grounds, enforced disappearance of persons [and] other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury, to body or to mental or physical health.”