effect, even after the cessation of hostilities, for those protected persons in need of repatriation. The second repatriation provision appears in Article 158, which covers the procedures whereby a state may “denounce” the Convention. Specifically, Article 158(3) states that a denunciation may not take effect until after the repatriation of protected persons has occurred. The Right of Return in Cases of Forcible (Mass) Expulsion There is a second type of right of return provided for in humanitarian law. This applies when persons have been displaced through a forcible expulsion (for example, at gunpoint, under threat of fire or through the deliberate military “stampeding” of a population out of its place of habitual residence). The involuntary transfer of even a single individual – e.g., through deportation – is conclusively prohibited under humanitarian law. Deliberate, forcible expulsion – when carried out on a mass scale – is therefore even more strongly prohibited under humanitarian law. The only appropriate corrective remedy for forcible expulsion, under international law, is implementation of the right of return. The prohibition against forcible expulsion has its basis in Article 46(1) of the Hague Regulations. Pierre Mounier, an assistant prosecutor for the Allies in the criminal prosecution of the Nazi leaders in the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, stated in his opening arguments on November 20, 1945 that deportation violated Article 46 of the Hague Regulations, as well as customary international law in general.[25] For that reason, the Charter of the International Military Tribunal included deportation in the definition of both “war crimes” (in Article 6(b) of the IMT Charter) and “crimes against humanity” (in Article 6(c) of the IMT Charter). Barring the return of forcibly expelled persons was similarly condemned as illegal. The prohibition against forcible expulsion – and the related remedy of repatriation (the right of return) – appear in three articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 45 strictly limits the circumstances under which protected persons may be temporarily transferred (i.e., only to the care of another state party to the Fourth Geneva Convention) and categorically requires repatriation of protected persons to their (habitual) residence following the cessation of hostilities. Article 49 prohibits forcible expulsion in quite express terms: “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” Like Article 45, Article 49 also requires immediate repatriation “to their homes” of all persons (including those temporarily evacuated during extreme necessity) following the cessation of hostilities. Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines “grave breaches” of the Convention, which are violations of humanitarian law of such egregious severity that they are required to be made subject to penal (criminal) sanctions by all other “Contracting Parties” to the Convention (i.e., states which have signed the Convention). Deportation and forcible population transfer are classified as grave breaches. Under the theory developed by the prosecutors at the IMT in Nuremberg, deliberately blocking the right of return of persons forcibly expelled also falls well within the scope of a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Yet another