war criminal
51
6.4
- noun
- /wɔr ˈkrɪmɪnəl/
- Specialized
:
criminal de guerra
- Over the past decade in particular, the prosecutions of war criminals have featured prominently.
- indict war criminals
- prosecution of war criminals
- prosecute war criminals
This whole war was started for, for, for greed, you know, and the war criminals that started and continued it.
- This whole war was started for, for, for greed, you know, and the war criminals that started and continued it.
- He is a horrible, horrible, sociopathic war criminal.
- And more specifically, do you think that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal?
- I mean, in some circles, Kissinger is accused of contributing, you know, being a war criminal.
- But he had a hangman's MOS and had actually been involved in hanging the Japanese war criminals.
- He called some of the victims quote little Eichmann's, comparing them to a Nazi war criminal, a claim on which I once got the chance to challenge Professor Churchill.
- Qatar funds Hamas, Syrian President, war criminal was on an FBI wanted poster.
- They have a whole bunch of POW like the absolute war criminals in housed at at Bagram.
- Who's literally the biggest war criminal.
- But in the media it is the most prevalent and widely known egregious war criminal story about Eddie Gallagher, right?
- They got big bounty money and they love doing what they did, you know, and these are war criminals.
Examples
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The Nuremberg tribunals, established to try accused war criminals, had the power to label certain organizations as criminal.
Academic text (2011) -
Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and one day soon Putin must face justice in The Hague.
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The president is a war criminal.
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What we do know is that there was a place for war criminals within British military culture during the Great War.
Academic text (2010) -
Particularly now that so many of the war criminals are at liberty.
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A trial of the major German war criminals seemed like a reasonable project with which to begin.
Academic text (1997) -
Khan and his crew were condemned to death as war criminals.
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For example, there is one Serbian war criminal who is in German custody at the present time.
Academic text (1994) -
London seemed reluctant to punish major Nazi war criminals through judicial proceedings.
Academic text (1997) -
The U.N. tribunal has convicted 14 war criminals since trials began in 1995.
Synonyms
∞
2.1
A person who has committed a crime or broken the law
How Deadly
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound 'war criminal' is transparently composed from 'war' (armed conflict) + 'criminal' (a person who commits a crime), so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer it means a person who commits crimes in the context of war. While full legal specifics (e.g., international law, crimes against humanity) are technical, the basic referent is clearly derivable from the constituents and common cross-linguistically.
Etymology
War criminal comes from joining war, meaning fighting between countries, and criminal, meaning someone who breaks the law, and it began to be used when people wanted a name for someone who breaks the rules of war and should be punished by a court. So, war criminal means 'a person who breaks the laws of war'.