No Quarter

No quarter is a military order directing that captured enemy combatants be executed rather than taken prisoner, whether in warfare or piracy. It has been prohibited as a war crime under international law since the Hague Convention of 1899, and Article 23 of the 1907 Hague Convention explicitly forbids declaring that no quarter will be given; the prohibition also binds as customary international law and is separately forbidden by the Rome Statute. Quarter, in this sense, is the obligation to spare the life of a combatant who is no longer fighting because of sickness, wounds, shipwreck, or having laid down arms and surrendered. The prohibition traces back at least to the Lieber Code issued during the American Civil War, and in 1948 a United States military court convicted senior German military officers of the crime of ordering no quarter in the High Command Case. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/