Suchergebnisse

The rapid ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the orderly election of its judges and prosecutor belie the radical nature of the new institution. The Court has jurisdiction over genocide, aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes—crimes of the utmost seriousness often committed by governments themselves, or with their tacit approval. The ICC has the formal authority to adjudge the actions of high state officials as criminal and to send them to jail, no matter how lofty the accused's position or undisputed the legality of those acts under domestic law. While the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) also possess this authority, those institutions operate directly under the control of the United Nations Security Council and within narrow territorial limits. The ICC, by contrast, is largely independent of the Council and vests the power to investigate and prosecute the politically sensitive crimes within its broad territorial sweep in a single individual, its independent prosecutor.

Contemporary international criminal law is largely concerned with holding individual defendants responsible for mass atrocities. Because the crimes usually involve the concerted efforts of many individuals, allocating responsibility among those individuals is of critical importance. This Article examines two liability doctrines – joint criminal enterprise and command responsibility – that play a central role in that allocation of guilt in international criminal tribunals. The Article posits a general framework for understanding the development of international criminal law, as an outgrowth of three legal traditions: domestic criminal law, international human rights law, and transitional justice. We explore the application of that framework to the joint criminal enterprise and command responsibility doctrines and argue that viewing joint criminal enterprise and command responsibility through the lens of our framework shows the need for certain doctrinal reforms. Finally, we discuss the application of liability doctrines developed in the context of inter-national criminal tribunals to prosecutions for international or transnational crimes in other fo-rums, such as domestic military tribunal prosecutions of terrorists, that do not share the same roots as international criminal law.