Complicity In International Law

This timely book examines the responsibility of international organizations for complicity in human rights and humanitarian law violations. It comprehensively addresses a lacuna in current scholarship through an analysis of the mandates and modus operandi of UN peace operations, offering workable normative solutions and striking a balance between the UN’s duty not to contribute to international law violations and its need to discharge mandated tasks in a highly volatile environment.

Analysing the nature of complicity in international criminal law, this book provides an account of the growing attention being paid to the issue. Exploring the responsibilities of individuals, states, and non-state actors in their obligations, the changing status of complicity in international law is demonstrated.

This book tackles one of the most contentious aspects of international criminal law – the modes of liability. At the heart of the discussion is the quest for balance between the accused's individual contribution and the collective nature of mass offending. The principle of legality demands that there exists a well-defined link between the crime and the person charged with it. This is so even in the context of international offending, which often implies 'several degrees of separation' between the direct perpetrator and the person who authorises the atrocity. The challenge is to construct that link without jeopardising the interests of justice. This monograph provides the first comprehensive treatment of complicity within the discipline and beyond. Extensive analysis of the pertinent statutes and jurisprudence reveals gaps in interpreting accessorial liability. Simultaneously, the study of complicity becomes a test for the general methods and purposes of international criminal law. The book exposes problems with the sources of law and demonstrates the absence of clearly defined sentencing and policy rationales, which are crucial tools in structuring judicial discretion. Awarded The Paul Guggenheim Prize in International Law 2017!

This systematic analysis of State complicity in international law focuses on the rules of State responsibility. Combining a theoretical perspective on complicity based on the concept of the international rule of law with a thorough analysis of international practice, Helmut Philipp Aust establishes what forms of support for wrongful conduct entail responsibility of complicit States and sheds light on the consequences of complicity in terms of reparation and implementation. Furthermore, he highlights how international law provides for varying degrees of responsibility in cases of complicity, depending on whether peremptory norms have been violated or special subject areas such as the law of collective security are involved. The book shows that the concept of State complicity is firmly grounded in international law, and that the international rule of law may serve as a conceptual paradigm for today's international legal order.

This book examines how international law prohibits state and individual complicity. Complicity is a derivative form of responsibility that links an accomplice to the wrongdoing of a principal actor. Whenever a legal system prohibits complicity, it must address certain questions as to the content and structure of the rules. To understand how international law answers these questions, this book proposes an analytical framework in which complicity rules may be assessed and defends a normative claim as to how they should be structured. Anchored by this framework and normative claim, this book shows that international criminal law regulates individual complicity in a comprehensive way, using the doctrines of instigation and aiding and abetting to inculpate complicit participants in international crimes. By contrast, international law's regulation of state complicity was historically marked by an absence of complicity rules. This is changing. In respect of state complicity in the wrongdoing of another state, international law now imposes both specific and general complicity obligations, the latter prohibiting states from aiding or assisting another state in the commission of any internationally wrongful act. In respect of the ways that states participate in harms caused by non-state actors, the traditional normative structure of international law, which imposed obligations only on states, foreclosed the possibility of prohibiting the state's participation as a form of complicity. As that traditional normative structure has evolved, so the possibility of holding states responsible for complicity in the wrongdoing of non-state actors has emerged. More and more, both the wrongs that international actors commit, and the wrongs they help or encourage others to commit, matter.

Complicity in International Law aims to analyze questions arising from a state's complicity in conflict with another state or an international organization. On the basis of international legal provisions, a state that assists the illicit fact of another state or an international organization in turn commits an offense if it is aware of the main fact and is bound by the same obligation.International law offers adumbrates the outcome of a codification process undertaken by the International Law Commission. The practice and its consequences, and the reflections of the doctrine, have matured with regard to the original hypothesis. Several cases of participation in the unlawful conduct of others, for example in facilitating the illicit use of the armed force, or of financial support to states responsible for human rights violations, have been recorded since the period immediately following World War II.International doctrine has long shown great interest in the theme of competition of several subjects in an international illicit act. This is a new phenomenon, given that until recently the issue had been the subject of in-depth analysis in a small number of works, few of which have been monographic in nature. Complicity in International Law will address the issue comprehensively.

This volume deals with the tension between unity and diversification which has gained a central place in the debate under the label of ‘fragmentation’. It explores the meaning, articulation and risks of this phenomenon in a specific area: International Criminal Justice. It brings together established and fresh voices who analyse different sites and contestations of this concept, as well as its context and specific manifestations in the interpretation and application of International Criminal Law. The volume thereby connects discourse on ‘fragmentation’ with broader inquiry on the merits and discontents of legal pluralism in ‘Public International Law’.