The Geneva Conventions and Georgian Criminal Law
The Geneva Conventions are the central instrument of international humanitarian law, and their protection at the national level occurs through criminal implementation. The Criminal Code of Georgia contains the corresponding norms: genocide, crimes against humanity, and the deliberate violation of the norms of international humanitarian law during armed conflict. These compositions form the core through which international legal norms are applied in a national court.
Genocide is defined as an act committed in the execution of an agreed plan to destroy, wholly or in part, a group united by national, ethnic, racial, religious or any other sign — through murder, serious injury to health, deliberate creation of harsh living conditions, forcible reduction of births, or forcible transfer of children. The sanction — imprisonment from twelve to twenty years or life.
Crimes Against Humanity
A crime against humanity is any act committed against the civilian population or persons within the framework of a widespread or systematic attack: murder, mass extermination, serious injury to health, deportation, unlawful deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, sexual enslavement, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, violent sterilisation, persecution on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, sexual or other grounds, apartheid and other inhumane acts. The sanction lies in the same range — twelve to twenty years or life imprisonment.
Violations of Humanitarian Law
A separate group consists of the deliberate violation of the norms of international humanitarian law in an international or non-international armed conflict: attacks on the civilian population; indiscriminate attacks known to cause casualties; action against a combatant who has ceased participation; improper use of protective signs — the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, the Red Crystal; transfer or deportation of the population of an occupied territory; groundless obstruction of the repatriation of prisoners; apartheid; attacks on cultural heritage.
A separate norm concerns medical procedures on detained persons: conducting, at the risk of health or with mutilation, a procedure not required by the person's state of health and not corresponding to generally recognised medical norms — even with the person's consent. The remaining violations — pillage, the use of civilians to shield operations, methods causing excessive damage — lie in a separate composition.