Collective Punishment

Collective punishment is the penalizing of an entire group or community for an act allegedly committed by only some of its members, whether an ethnic or political group, or the family, friends and neighbors of the person accused. It violates the principle of individual responsibility by targeting people who bear no direct connection to the act beyond living in the same area or belonging to the same group. The practice has been treated as a war crime under international humanitarian law since the Hague Convention of 1899, and is explicitly prohibited by Common Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and by its Second Additional Protocol, both of which bar punishing any protected person for an offense that person did not personally commit, along with all measures of intimidation or terrorism. During the Second World War, occupying forces used collective punishment against entire villages, towns and districts to suppress resistance activity, and the postwar Geneva Conventions reiterated the principle of individual responsibility partly in response to that practice. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/