ABSTRACT
Mass atrocity affects millions of people worldwide; still, atrocity crime remains an under-examined area within criminology. Atrocity crime disconnects an ultimate legal judgment from preventive and protective action, which necessarily has to precede it. The list of crimes in the bodies of law that Scheffer labels "atrocity laws" is long. The majority of these are direct acts of violence against life and person, deprivation that causes serious bodily and mental harm, and particularly humiliating and degrading treatment. Contemporary atrocity crimes are embedded in trajectories of long-term conflict, and the majority of mass killings since the Second World War have been part of civil wars and ethnic conflicts. Paramilitary groups are perpetrators of numerous atrocity crimes, from displacement to systematic killings; when they enter a conflict this generally raises the level of atrocity crimes. Latin America is the only global region where state-led atrocity decreased over the past decades and defied the global trend, even if still remaining on high levels.
