What is an International Crime? (A Revisionist History)

Abstract

The question "what is an international crime?" has two aspects. First, it asks us to identify which acts qualify as international crimes. Second, and more fundamentally, it asks us to identify what is distinctive about an international crime.Some disagreement exists concerning the first issue, particularly with regard to torture and terrorism. But nearly all states, international tribunals, and ICL scholars take the same position concerning the second issue, insisting that an act qualifies as an international crime if-and only if-that act is universally criminal under international law.This definition of an international crime leads to an obvious question: how exactly does an act become universally criminal under international law? One answer, the "direct criminalization thesis" (DCT), is that certain acts are universally criminal because they are directly criminalized by international law itself, regardless of whether states criminalize them. Another answer, the "national criminalization thesis" (NCT), rejects the idea that international law directly criminalizes particular acts. According to the NCT, certain acts are universally criminal because international law obligates every state in the world to criminalize them.This Article argues that if we take positivism seriously, as every international criminal tribunal since Nuremberg has insisted we must, the NCT provides the only coherent explanation of how international law can deem certain acts to be universally criminal.

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“…For example, at the 25th United Nations Conference on Climate Change that took place in Madrid in 2019, the GrowSmarter project had a panel to share urban efficiency practices in renewable energy. This meeting resulted in consensus between political representatives from different cities in Spain 8 . In the specific case of Cologne, it has been working with the neighbouring town of Leverkusen on mobility issues since 2019 based on the lessons learned through GrowSmarter 9 .…”

“…Thus, In addition to the threats of conflict between Greece and Turkey over the Cyprus issue and disputes over area of influence and access to resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, there are also tensions resulting from Ankara's purchase of the Russian S-400 defence system. Turkey's disagreements with NATO and the United States over this acquisition have led Washington to impose harsh trade sanctions on Turkey recently 8 . The Turkish foreign minister, in addition to classifying the North American decision as a serious mistake, said that the sanctions had an effect on NATO cohesion, promising that Turkey will do everything to retaliate, in an appropriate manner and at the appropriate time (Gumrukcu, 2020).…”

“…The authors also refer to the need to set aside the one-sidedness of rational choice analyses, more or less behaviorist, including a fair allusion to Clausewitz (Duyvesteyn & Worral, 2017: 349). 8 Once again we are faced with redundancy. It has long been the case that strategy, precisely to account for the asystematic nature of the war 7The italics are ours.…”

“…Such repression is required, despite the difficulties related to national laws of amnesties from punishment, and the immunity enjoyed by political and military leaders in various countries 7 . The absence of an international consensus -especially from major countries such as the United States, Russia and China -on the legitimacy and importance of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a mainly international judicial organ for the prosecution of the perpetrators of international crimes means that the UCJ has become a principal factor in the international campaign against the suppression of international crimes 8 . Many States members in the Sixth Commission of GAUN, in its 73 rd meeting issued statements refusing to adopt the UCJ in their national laws due to the lack of scope and definition of the UCJ 9 .…”

América Latina y la Prehistoria del Derecho Penal Internacional

“…Podría objetarse que esta exclusión es fácilmente justificable desde lo jurídico: los procesos penales en Argentina de la década de 1980 constituyeron una instancia de aplicación de derecho penal interno por parte de un tribunal doméstico, por lo que no tendría sentido analizarlo desde una perspectiva de derecho penal internacional. Efectivamente, aunque la definición de derecho penal internacional y el límite preciso de sus alcances han sido objeto de mucho debate (véase, por ejemplo, Schwarzenberger, 1950;O'Keefe, 2015: 47-84;Chehtman, 2017;Heller, 2017), la mayoría de las definiciones convencionales excluirían a un proceso en el que no se investiguen crímenes internacionales -por ejemplo, genocidio, crímenes de lesa humanidad o crímenes de guerra-. Los responsables por las violaciones de derechos humanos durante la dictadura fueron, en cambio, condenados como autores de crímenes domésticos -notablemente; homicidios, tormentos y privación ilegítima de la libertad-y no de crímenes internacionales 8 .…”