A fact from Starvation (crime) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 18 November 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that the killing of hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians by starvation in the siege of Leningrad was ruled not criminal by an American court?
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The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
... that the killing of hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians by starvation in the siege of Leningrad was ruled not criminal by an American court? Source: Mulder, Nicholas; van Dijk, Boyd (2021). "Why Did Starvation Not Become the Paradigmatic War Crime in International Law?". Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories. Oxford University Press. pp. 370–. ISBN 9780192898036.
Do we have a list page of famines where at least some WP:RS claim that they constitute famine crimes (= starvation crimes)? A list like this should include a column such as "near consensus" or "disputed" to describe the current research status, e.g. Iranian famine of 1942–1943 seems to have very few references as a famine crime even though the currently sourced facts would seem to qualify it, and the famine in northern Ethiopia (2020–present) is seen as having criminal intent by many sources. Boud (talk) 17:30, 8 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Issue with the Iranian famine is that it occurred at a time enforced starvation was still legal. Unless it was a genocide (from 1948), we can probably only talk about criminality in the legal sense from the late 20th century: "Although abuses against civilians directly committed by regular soldiers such as murder and torture were widely recognised as crimes, the starvation of civilians only came to be identified as such in 1977 with the Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions." (from Mulder & Dijk) (t · c) buidhe 17:43, 8 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that a list using historians' sense of famine crime - such as Conley & de Waal (currently ref [3]) - would be useful, though of course a list would have to distinguish "what would have been considered as a famine crime under late XX century IHL applied retrospectively" vs "what should be considered a famine crime given the evidence and the chronology of IHL" vs ... the currently non-existent cases that have already been found in court to have been famine crimes. Conley & de Waal list several events prior to the late XXth C. Unfortunately, the current sentence There are no systematic studies of the perpetration of starvation crimes that is apparently justified by p371 of Mulder & van Dijk 2021 suggests that we'll have to wait for researchers for at least a few years before there are enough sources to justify enough pages for a list. But I was wondering if someone started a list anyway - whatever its quality - that just happens to be hard to find. Boud (talk) 16:58, 10 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think so, even this article is very new, it's an understudied topic imv. Also, personally I'm skeptical that a legal frame is the right one for historical events - if not illegal, it's hard to see how we can call it a crime without pov. Even with fewer legal ambiguities, editors are cautious with killing vs. murder in articles—correctly so. (t · c) buidhe 18:30, 10 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I slightly prefer ALT1. AryKun (talk) 14:17, 3 November 2023 (UTC)