Vol. 41, Nos. 2 & 3 (2009)
Vol. 41, No. 1 (2009)
Vol. 40, No. 3 (2009)
Vol. 40, Nos. 1 & 2 (2008)
Vol. 39, No. 3 (2007-08)
Vol. 39, Nos. 1 & 2 (2006-07)
Vol. 38, Nos. 3 & 4 (2006-07)
International Justice and Shifting Paradigms
Vol. 38, No. 2 (2006-07)
Vol. 38, No. 1 (2006)
Vol. 37, Nos. 2 & 3 (2006)
FOREWORD AND DEDICATION
Michael P. Scharf & Philip S. Hadji
Sixty-one years ago, the Nuremberg Tribunal convicted the Nazi leaders of waging a war of aggression, prompting Nuremberg Prosecutor Robert Jackson to declare that this was the most important contribution of the historic trial. During the Cold War era, however, when the United States and Soviet Union and their proxies were involved in numerous armed conflicts around the globe, the idea of prosecuting the crime of aggression fell out of favor. Thus, none of the modern ad hoc international war crimes tribunals (the Yugoslavia Tribunal, the Rwanda Tribunal, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the Cambodia Tribunal) were given jurisdiction over the crime of aggression.
At the 1988 Rome Diplomatic Conference to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC), former Nuremberg Prosecutors Henry King, Ben Ferencz, and Whitney Harris, used their unique moral authority, dogged persistence, and formidable skills of persuasion to convince the delegates to include the crime of aggression in the Court's statute. But, in a compromise, the ICC Statute stipulates that before the Court can exercise jurisdiction over this crime, the States Parties must adopt a provision at the Review Conference (scheduled for 2010 in Kampala, Uganda) setting forth a definition of aggression and the conditions under which the Court could exercise its jurisdiction over it.
The question of where (and how) the line should be drawn between "just war" and "war crime" turned out to be an extremely difficult one . . .
41 CASE W. RES. J. INT’L L. 267 (2009).
