The crime of aggression before the International Criminal Court : introduction to the symposium

Abstract

On 17 July 2018, on the 20th anniversary of the adoption of its Statute, the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the crime of aggression became operational.1 This was the first time in 70 years – since the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals – that an international tribunal would possess the possibility of prosecuting leaders for the ‘supreme international crime’, the crime against peace. Leaders allegedly responsible for planning or executing an act of aggression that by its character, gravity and scale constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations (UN Charter) are to be called to account before an international criminal jurisdiction. It took a long time to get there, for sure, and it also took quite a lot of work. The decision to include aggression among the crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC was taken in Rome in 1998, but that decision amounted to nothing more than a placeholder for more difficult decisions to come regarding the definition of the crime and the conditions for the exercise of jurisdiction over it. Amazingly, those decisions were made in the early years of the Court, in Princeton, and then momentously late at night in June 2010 in Kampala at the first Review Conference of the Statute of the ICC. However, states again got cold feet and postponed activation of ICC jurisdiction for at least seven years. Eventually, the decision was made, again late at night and after marathon negotiations, in New York in December 2017, to activate the Court’s jurisdiction over the crime of aggression, with one final delay of just a few months and this time without requiring a further decision by states.