State Crimes

State crime is any action that violates international public law and/or a state's own domestic law when committed by individual actors acting on behalf of, or in the name of, the state, even when such acts are motivated by their personal economical, political, and ideological interests. Crimes of the state have been one of the foremost social problems of the past 100 years, with wide-reaching costs and little in the way of potential controls.

During the course of the 20th century, the state crimes of Turkey, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot and the Khymer Rouge, and Maoist China were especially large-scale, dramatic examples. Crimes of the state involving weapons of mass destruction, genocides, and crimes against humanity have been all too frequent (e.g., Bosnia, Croatia, Darfur, Democratic Republic of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia). Other charges of state crime occurring around the world involve Egypt, Israel, the United States, China, United Kingdom, Russia, Chechnya, and North Vietnam.

In the late 20th century, new major initiatives sought to bring perpetrators of crimes of the state to trial, including International Criminal Tribunals focusing on genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, and the establishment of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. As legal attention to such events increased, so has the scholarly community's attention toward description and analysis of these phenomena.