crime against humanity

English

Pronunciation

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Noun

crime against humanity (plural crimes against humanity)

  1. (now chiefly law) A very destructive and immoral act; later specifically, something causing widespread human misery or loss of life; an atrocity. [from 17th c.]
    The Holocaust was a terrible crime against humanity; it took the lives of 6 million Jews, 2 million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, homosexuals, Russians, and the elderly and disabled.
    • 1629, Richard Baxter, Christian Directory, IV.25:
      Be faithful to your friend that doth entrust you; remembring that perfidiousness or falseness to a friend, is a crime against humanity, and all society.
    • 1929, Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man:
      Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.
    • 2015 October 27, The Guardian:
      A Spanish judge has charged five suspected former leaders of the armed Basque separatist movement ETA with crimes against humanity for attacks carried out by the group after 2004 which killed 12 people.
  2. (colloquial, humorous, hyperbolic) Something objectionable.
    • 2021 July 13, Sara Fujimura, Faking Reality‎[1], Tom Doherty Associates, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC:
      “Pineapple on pizza is a crime against humanity,” Leo's voice is flat. Which is weird, because he usually adds “Fight me” at the end of that declaration.

Translations

a large-scale persecution of, or atrocity against, a body of people

See also

Further reading

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