Summary execution
execution immediately after being accused of a crime, without a fair trial; usually understood to mean capture, accusation, and execution all conducted during a very short span of time
In civil and military jurisprudence, summary execution (also called field execution) is the putting to death of a person accused of a crime without the benefit of a free and fair trial. The term results from the legal concept of summary justice to punish a summary offense, as in the case of a drumhead court-martial, but the term usually denotes the summary execution of a sentence of death. Under international law, it is defined as a combatant's refusal to accept an opponent's lawful surrender and the combatant's provision of no quarter, by killing the surrendering opponents.
Summary executions have been practiced by governments and paramilitary organizations during both peacetime and war, and are usually associated with war crimes and political persecution.
Military jurisdiction
Prisoners of war
Major treaties such as the Geneva Conventions and Hague Conventions, and customary international law protect the rights of captured regular or irregular enemy soldiers and civilians. Prisoners-of-war (POWs) must be treated in carefully defined ways which definitively ban summary execution, as the Second Additional Protocol of the Geneva Conventions (1977) states:
No sentence shall be passed and no penalty shall be executed on a person found guilty of an offence except pursuant to a conviction pronounced by a court offering the essential guarantees of independence and impartiality.
Exceptions to prisoners-of-war status
However, some classes of combatants may not be accorded POW status, but that definition has broadened to cover more classes of combatants over time. In the past, summary execution of pirates, spies, and francs-tireurs have been performed and considered legal under existing international law. Francs-tireurs (a term originating in the Franco-Prussian War) are enemy civilians or militia who continue to fight in territory occupied by a warring party and do not wear military uniforms, and may otherwise be known as guerrillas, partisans, insurgents, etc. Though they could be legally jailed or executed by most armies a century ago, the experience of World War II influenced nations occupied by foreign forces to change the law to protect this group.
“Summary execution” enters the record as execution immediately after being accused of a crime, without a fair trial; usually understood to mean capture, accusation, and execution all conducted during a very short span of time. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Summary, execution and immediately can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Summary execution” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.