Violation of laws and customs of war (article 438 of the Criminal code of Ukraine) is a war crime, which requires establishing contextual circumstances in the process of its qualification. These circumstances consist in the commission of illegal actions during an armed conflict of an international or non-international nature.

The purpose of this article is to determine specific manifestations of violation of the laws and customs of war and to develop rules of qualification on this basis, if such manifestations constitute so-called “general criminal” crimes, responsibility for which is provided in separate articles of the Special part of this Code.

Within the framework of the study, the contextual circumstances, in contrast to the approach in international humanitarian law, are not considered as defining characteristics that are the basis for assigning certain actions to the category of war crimes, but as a sign of the objective side of the relevant criminal offenses.

The case of a violation of the laws and customs of war by committing criminal offenses indicated in other articles of the Special part of the Criminal Code is suggested to identify as a conflict of criminal law norms about “the whole” and “the part”. Taking into account the rules of crimes qualification and with the aim of resolving that conflict, it is proposed to qualify these actions as a complex crime, if the violation of the laws and customs of war consisted in the commission of “general criminal” offenses, when they are equally or more socially dangerous than violations of the laws and customs of war. An assumption was made about the feasibility of defining special rules for the qualification of war crimes, in particular, the limited application of the principle of inadmissibility of double blaming and the need to qualify the actions of persons who violated the laws and customs of war as a complex crime in certain cases.

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