5cjxburmr

18.9.3.1 Acts Constituting Grave Breaches. The acts constituting “gravebreaches” for the purpose of triggering these obligations are defined differently depending on theparticular Geneva Convention. However, all of the Conventions include as grave breaches thefollowing acts against persons protected by the respective Convention:• willful killing;• torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments; and• willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health.The term “grave breaches” was deliberately chosen so as not to indicate that violations ofthose provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions were themselves crimes or that the 1949Geneva Conventions created an international penal code. 88Grave breaches of the GWS and GWS-Sea are those involving any of the following acts,if committed against persons or property protected by the GWS or GWS-Sea:• willful killing; torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments;• willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health; and• extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessityand carried out unlawfully and wantonly. 89Grave breaches of the GPW are those involving any of the following acts, if committedagainst persons or property protected by the GPW:• willful killing;88 See II-B FINAL RECORD OF THE DIPLOMATIC CONFERENCE OF GENEVA OF 1949 356-57 (“Mr. SINCLAIR (UnitedKingdom): The Soviet proposal to substitute in these Articles the word ‘crime’ for the words ‘grave breaches’ hasbeen very fully thrashed out both in the Special Committee and in the Joint Committee, and you will all have readthe results in the Reports of those Committees and in particular in the Special Report on penal sanctions. It is not aquestion as to whether or not these grave breaches are crimes, it is simply a question of finding appropriate wordsfor carrying out the intention behind these Articles which all the delegations who were responsible for framing thoseArticles were attempting to secure. That intention was to ensure that any persons who committed breaches of theseConventions would be suitably dealt with and punished according to the seriousness of the offences that theycommitted, and therefore it would have been quite inappropriate to have gone into the question of establishing a newpenal code in these Articles. For that reason the proposal in the present Soviet amendment has been rejectedthroughout this Conference. … Mr. YINGLING (United States of America): I associate myself with the remarkswhich have been made by the Delegate of the United Kingdom. I see no need for repeating the arguments. ThisConvention is clearly not a penal statute, and the term ‘crimes’ is clearly inappropriate to express violations of thisConvention, which will not be crimes until they are so made by domestic penal legislation.”).89 GWS art. 50 (“Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the followingacts, if committed against persons or property protected by the Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhumantreatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, andextensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfullyand wantonly.”); GWS-SEA art. 51 (same).1072