War Crimes

crime   [krahym] Show IPA
–noun
1.
an action or an instance of negligence that is deemed injurious to the public welfare or morals or to the interests of the state and that is legally prohibited.

Crimes are normally determined by laws. If a law is broken it is a crime. In order for there to be war crimes there have to be war laws. The world has not created a complete list of war laws so it is difficult for us to know what exactly is a war crime. The war laws are created based on past battles or fights where they believe sides have had unfair advantages or killed unnecessarily. So the laws are normally created afterwards. Once people realize that one side did something unfair they decide that they never want that to happen again so they create a rule. It is sort of like a late whistle in a sports game. Everyone is led to believe that the call wasn't going to be made and then after the fact they end up calling it. These possibly unknown laws might not have been intentionally broken. If the sides knew about the laws they were possibly going to break they might not have broken them. In order to correctly punish people for war crimes we need to get a set list of rules before the war has begun.

This probably doesn't make much sense.