No matter the war being fought, it's a sad fact that war crimes take place all around the world.

We need only look to Russia's offensive war in Ukraine to see how civilians are illegally targeted in an indiscriminate and disproportionate fashion,

and how mass killings, rapes and torture become illegitimate tactics of war.

I'm your host James Rogers, this is the warfare podcast and needless to say this episode contains content that some listeners may find upsetting.

But it's an important episode.

Because with contemporary events in mind I wanted to better understand the long history of war crimes,

to define legally what constitutes a crime, and to find out how those who

perpetrate such crimes are held to account.

To help us with this, we have Professor Honor Hathaway back on the podcast. Honor is Professor of International Law at Yale Law School

and a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law

for the United States Department of State since 2005.

As such, Honor, is the perfect person to take us through this fascinating, if not troubling, history. Hi honor welcome back to the warfare podcast how you doing today I'm great thank you so nice to be back with you a lot has changed in the world since you were last on the

podcast in July 2021 I think it was. In fact then we spoke about when the world outlawed

war back in the 1920s with the Kellogg Briand Pact but today with war raging

in Ukraine I think that sadly seems like a million years ago, doesn't it?

It certainly does. Yeah, a lot has changed since then and all kinds of questions raised about what it means to outlaw war and whether those changes have actually survived the last many months.

Well, exactly and that's why we wanted to get you back on was to talk about your legal expertise, your historical

expertise around the laws of war and to give us a bit of a legal historical backdrop

to the war crimes that have said to have been committed by Russia in Ukraine.

So if we are going to focus in on war crimes, let's start with the basics.

So where should we start in history?

Yeah, you know, what's so interesting is that the idea of a war crime is actually a pretty new idea.

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