Article

Medical war crimes

Sigrid Mehring

• Max Planck yearbook of United Nations law, Vol. 15, 2011, p. 229-279

English

This article will re-introduce the concept of medical grave breaches and medical war crimes, examine its implementation on an international level, and analyze its application in practice. For this, two international prosecutions of physicians for their actions during armed conflicts will provide an illustration: the Doctor's Trial before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the Ntakirutimana Trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The objective of the examination is, first, to discover how the concept of medical war crimes was introduced in an international prosecution, and, second, to assess the probability of future prosecutions for such crimes.

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