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Concept
Crimes against humanity under communist regimes
Summary
Crimes against humanity under communist regimes occurred during the 20th century, including forced deportations, massacres, torture, forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, terror, ethnic cleansing, and enslavement, as well as deliberate starvation of people (during the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward). Additional events included the use of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. Such events have been described as crimes against humanity.
The 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism stated that crimes which were committed in the name of communism should be assessed as crimes against humanity. The government of Cambodia has prosecuted former members of the Khmer Rouge and the governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have passed laws that have led to the prosecution of several perpetrators for their crimes against the Baltic peoples. They were tried for crimes which they committed during the occupation of the Baltic states in 1940 and 1941 as well as for crimes which they committed during the Soviet reoccupation of those states which occurred after World War II.
There is a scholarly consensus that the Cambodian genocide which was carried out by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Pol Pot in what became known as the Killing Fields was a crime against humanity. Over the course of 4 years, the Pol Pot regime was responsible for the deaths of approximately 2 million people through starvation, exhaustion, execution, lack of medical care as a result of the communist utopia experiment. Legal scholars Antoine Garapon and David Boyle, sociologist Michael Mann and professor of political science Jacques Sémelin all believe that the actions of the Communist Party of Kampuchea can best be described as a crime against humanity rather than a genocide. In 2018, the Khmer Rouge was declared guilty of committing genocide against the minority Muslim Cham and Vietnamese. Conviction appeal against court decision was rejected in 2022.
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