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War Crimes Tribunals

Until recently, the attempt to prosecute and punish individuals guilty of crimes
against humanity during wars was anad hocbusiness, and largely a matter of the
winners in a war punishing some of the leading members of the defeated
enemy society. Alternatively, it was a matter of domestic courts trying people
from defeated countries or even, in the case of Germany, from their own
population, under a patchwork of domestic andinternational law. The
Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal was such a matter of victors punishing
losers, and it set the precedent for the legitimacy of international action against
those guilty of war crimes. In the 1990s the gradual shift away from the classic
doctrine of national sovereignty and a greater acceptance of the rights of the
international community to police itself, combined with several shocking
returns to barbarism, especially in the former Yugoslavia, led to the creation
of new tribunals. The most important is the tribunal created by the UN in
1993 to deal with crimes against ‘international humanitarian law’ in the
countries of the former Yugoslavia. This tribunal is still sitting, and in 2001
was successful in arranging the deportation of the former political leader of
Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milos ̆evic ́ to face trial. Another such tribunal was created
in 1994 to prosecute those guilty of offences in Rwanda. This, though
doubtless equally necessary, has the slightly unusual character of being effec-
tively an external punishment of those guilty of horror during an internal
ethnic conflict. As a precedent it may indeed be more important, as it signals an
even greater breach of the doctrine of nationalsovereignty.
Clearly suchad hoctribunals, however effective and impartial, will always
risk the appearance of being unsystematic andpost hocresponses to specific
events. What is needed, and this has now been accepted internationally, is a
criminal version of the permanent international court, the International Court
of Justice (see alsointernational law). Thus, in 1998, an international
conference in Rome under UN auspices finalized the statute of an Interna-
tional Criminal Court, which will have jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes
against humanity and genocide. It is also supposed to have jurisdiction over the
rather vague crime of aggression, but it is unclear whether this will ever be