Command Responsibility

Command responsibility is the legal doctrine of hierarchical accountability for war crimes under which a commanding military officer or a superior civilian official can be held legally responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by subordinates, including through a failure to prevent or punish those acts, not only through direct orders to commit them. The idea has ancient roots, reaching back to The Art of War, attributed to Sun Tzu in the fifth century BC, which discussed the duty of a commander to see that soldiers observed the customary laws of war, and its first formal legal application came in 1474 in the trial of Peter von Hagenbach before the Holy Roman Empire for atrocities committed by his soldiers during a military occupation. The United States Lieber Code of 1863, adopted during the Civil War, codified command responsibility in American military law by holding commanders responsible for war crimes committed by their subordinates, and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 gave the doctrine an international legal foundation. The doctrine was refined further at the Nuremberg trials and later tribunals, which produced standards such as the Yamashita standard, requiring commanders to take reasonable steps to prevent and punish crimes by their subordinates, and the Medina standard, which extended similar liability to American officers.