Legal Status of Desertion in Cases of War Crime
Under international law, ultimate "duty" or "responsibility" is not necessarily always to a "Government" nor to "a superior," as seen in the fourth of the Nuremberg Principles, which states:
"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
Although a soldier under direct orders, in battle, is normally not subject to prosecution for war crimes, there is legal language supporting a soldier's refusal to commit such crimes, in military contexts outside of immediate peril: In 1998, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights document called “Conscientious objection to military service, United Nations Commission on Human Rights resolution 1998/77” recognized that “persons performing military service may develop conscientious objections” while performing military service.
This opens the possibility of desertion as a response to cases in which the soldier is required to perform crimes against humanity as part of his mandatory military duty. This principle was tested unsuccessfully in the case of U.S. Army deserter Jeremy Hinzman, which resulted in a Canadian federal court rejecting refugee status to a deserter invoking Nuremberg Article IV.
Read more about this topic: Desertion
Famous quotes containing the words legal, status, desertion, cases, war and/or crime:
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)
“Knowing how beleaguered working mothers truly are—knowing because I am one of them—I am still amazed at how one need only say “I work” to be forgiven all expectation, to be assigned almost a handicapped status that no decent human being would burden further with demands. “I work” has become the universally accepted excuse, invoked as an all-purpose explanation for bowing out, not participating, letting others down, or otherwise behaving inexcusably.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[W]e must remember that so long as war exists on earth there will be some danger that even the Nation that most ardently desires peace may be drawn into war.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)