Starvation and international crime

Abstract

One of the most pernicious causes of the backsliding on global hunger is the human infliction of deprivation, whether in the form of belligerents’ decisions about how to wage war or governments’ decisions about how to exercise control over populations. Some of these decisions are criminal, but accountability is rare. Change requires building the confidence of prosecutors and investigators in the viability of the legal tools available, despite the relative graduality of the effects of deprivation as compared to other atrocity crimes, the challenges associated with establishing the cause of those effects in complex and multivariate conditions, and the fact that many of those subject to mass deprivation endure torturous suffering without dying. Given that context, the agents of international criminal accountability would do well to focus on the war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and the crime against humanity of “other inhumane acts.” This article explains why those crimes are most expressively and evidentiarily apt and charts the contours of the relevant law.

Keywords

• international criminal law
• starvation
• deprivation
• war crimes
• crimes against humanity
• genocide