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The International Criminal Court is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal that sits in The Hague, Netherlands. The ICC is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. It is intended to complement existing national judicial systems, and it may, therefore, exercise its jurisdiction only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute criminals. The ICC lacks universal territorial jurisdiction and may only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, crimes committed by nationals of member states, or crimes in situations referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council.
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by the combatants, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war; torture; taking hostages; unnecessarily destroying civilian property; deception by perfidy; rape; pillaging; the conscription of child soldiers; committing genocide or ethnic cleansing; the granting of no quarter, despite surrender; and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
Universal jurisdiction allows states or international organizations to claim criminal jurisdiction over an accused person regardless of where the alleged crime was committed, and regardless of the accused's nationality, country of residence, or any other relation with the prosecuting entity. Crimes prosecuted under universal jurisdiction are considered crimes against all, too serious to tolerate jurisdictional arbitrage.
Extradition is an action wherein one jurisdiction delivers a person accused or convicted of committing a crime in another jurisdiction, over to the other's law enforcement. It is a cooperative law enforcement procedure between the two jurisdictions and depends on the arrangements made between them. In addition to legal aspects of the process, extradition also involves the physical transfer of custody of the person being extradited to the legal authority of the requesting jurisdiction.
Faryadi Sarwar Zardad is an Afghan former warlord. In 2005 he was convicted in the United Kingdom, for conspiring to take hostages and conspiring to torture during the 1990s in Afghanistan.
International criminal law is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetration. The core crimes under international law are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression. This article also discusses crimes against international law, which may not be part of the body of international criminal law.
Command responsibility, also called superior responsibility, the Yamashita standard, or the Medina standard, is the legal doctrine of hierarchical accountability for war crimes. The legal doctrine of Command Responsibility was codified in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and is partly based upon the American Lieber Code, a war manual for the Union forces, authorized by US President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, two years into the course of the American Civil War. The legal doctrine of command responsibility was first applied by the German Supreme Court, in the Leipzig War Crimes Trials (1921), which included the trial of Imperial German Army officer Emil Müller for the war crimes that he committed during the First World War (1914–1918).
So far, the International Criminal Court opened investigations in the Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Darfur, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya; Libya, Uganda, Bangladesh/Myanmar, Palestine and Venezuela. Additionally, the Office of the Prosecutor conducted preliminary examinations in twelve situations in Afghanistan, Bolivia, Colombia, Guinea, Iraq / the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Georgia, Honduras, South Korea and Venezuela. Preliminary investigations were closed in Gabon, Honduras, registered vessels of Comoros, Greece, and Cambodia, South Korea, and Colombia on events since 1 July 2002.
Immunity from prosecution is a doctrine of international law that allows an accused to avoid prosecution for criminal offences. Immunities are of two types. The first is functional immunity, or immunity ratione materiae. This is an immunity granted to people who perform certain functions of state. The second is personal immunity, or immunity ratione personae. This is an immunity granted to certain officials because of the office they hold, rather than in relation to the act they have committed.
The states parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court are those sovereign states that have ratified, or have otherwise become party to, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The Rome Statute is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, an international court that has jurisdiction over certain international crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes that are committed by nationals of states parties or within the territory of states parties. States parties are legally obligated to co-operate with the Court when it requires, such as in arresting and transferring indicted persons or providing access to evidence and witnesses. States parties are entitled to participate and vote in proceedings of the Assembly of States Parties, which is the Court's governing body. Such proceedings include the election of such officials as judges and the Prosecutor, the approval of the Court's budget, and the adoption of amendments to the Rome Statute.
General Augusto Pinochet was indicted for human rights violations committed in his native Chile by Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón on 10 October 1998. He was arrested in London six days later and held on house arrest for a year and a half before being released by the British government in March 2000. Authorised to return to Chile, Pinochet was subsequently indicted by judge Juan Guzmán Tapia and charged with several crimes. He died on 10 December 2006 without having been convicted. His arrest in London made the front pages of newspapers worldwide; not only did it involve the head of the military dictatorship that ruled Chile between 1973 and 1990, it marked the first time judges had applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed in a country by former heads of state, despite the existence of local amnesty laws.
Ricardo Miguel Cavallo is a retired Argentine naval lieutenant commander. Under the name Miguel Angel Cavallo, he served as an officer of the National Reorganization Process, which ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. On the basis of his activities in secret G-322 operations, he was later charged with kidnapping, torture, and/or murder, of hundreds of political dissidents.
The Völkerstrafgesetzbuch, abbreviated VStGB, is a German law that regulates crimes against (public) international law. It allows cases to be brought against suspects under international criminal law provisions, meaning that suspects can be prosecuted even though both they and their victims are foreigners and the crime itself took place abroad.
The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) is a US non-profit international human rights organization based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1998, CJA represents survivors of torture and other grave human rights abuses in cases against individual rights violators before U.S. and Spanish courts. CJA has pioneered the use of civil litigation in the United States as a means of redress for survivors from around the world.
Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, is a war criminal convicted for the killing Bengali intellectuals in collaboration with the Pakistan Army at the time of the Bangladesh Liberation War. After the liberation of Bangladesh, Chowdhury escaped from Bangladesh and took British citizenship. He has been absconding in the UK ever since.
R v Bow St Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate [2000] 1 AC 61, 119 and 147 is a set of three UK constitutional law judgments by the House of Lords that examined whether former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was entitled to claim state immunity from torture allegations made by a Spanish court and therefore avoid extradition to Spain. They have proven to be of landmark significance in international criminal law and human rights law.
Witch-hunts are still occurring in Nepal in the twenty-first century, and the persecution of marginalised individuals of the community, especially women, still persists. Witchcraft is believed to be the exercise of supernatural powers by witches. Although Nepal does not have a recorded history of systematic witch-hunts, belief in the supernatural, magic, and humans capable of exploiting both to do good or harm is pervasive. In many instances, witch-hunts are simply tribal scapegoating measures carried out to serve ulterior motives, such as getting revenge or winning property disputes.
Agnes Reeves Taylor, ex-wife of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, was born on 27 September 1965 in Liberia. On 2 June 2017, she was arrested in London by the Metropolitan Police and charged with torture on the grounds of her suspected involvement with the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NFPL) rebel group, which was led by her ex-husband, during the First Liberian Civil War, from 1989 to 1996.
Anwar Raslan, born 3 February 1963) is a former Syrian colonel who led a unit of Syria's General Intelligence Directorate. In 2020, he was charged with crimes against humanity in a German Higher Regional Court under universal jurisdiction. The specific charges against him are 4,000 counts of torture, 58 counts of murder, and rape and sexual coercion. His case is the first internationally against a member of the Syrian regime under Bashar al-Assad.
References
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- 1 2 Hovell, Devika (2017-04-06). "The 'Mistrial' of Kumar Lama: Problematizing Universal Jurisdiction". European Journal of International Law . Archived from the original on 2021-05-14. Retrieved 2022-01-05.
- 1 2 "Arrest of Colonel Lama: Army Set Back". Spotlight Nepal . 14 January 2013. Archived from the original on 2021-06-03. Retrieved 9 December 2014.