International Crimes Of State

Ramona Pedretti offers, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the rules of customary international law relating to immunity of Heads of State and other State officials in the context of crimes pursuant to international law and their relationship with core principles of international law. The book gives the reader a full picture of this topical issue which is located at the heart of today's development of international law. It contains an in-depth evaluation of a vast amount of relevant material, ranging from domestic laws to judicial decisions of domestic and international courts. The fact that the International Law Commission is deliberating the issue with a view to drafting an international treaty underscores the book's importance and timeliness.

This book offers a unique comparison between state and individual responsibility for international crimes and examines the theories that can explain the relationship between these two regimes. The study provides a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the relevant international practice from the standpoint of both international criminal law, and in particular the case law of international criminal tribunals, and state responsibility. The author shows the various connections and issues arising from the parallel establishment of state and individual responsibility for the commission of the same international crimes. These connections indicate a growing need to better co-ordinate these regimes of international responsibility. The author maintains that a general conception, according to which state and individual responsibility are two separate sets of secondary rules attached to the breach of the same primary norms, can help to solve the various issues relating to this dual responsibility. This conception of the complementarity between state and individual responsibility justifies co-ordination and consistent application of these two different regimes, each of which aims to foster compliance with the most important obligations owed to the international community as a whole.

This book theorizes how weaker states in the international system use the ICC to advance their security and political interests.

This book focuses on the concept of state responsibility for international crimes, which gained support following the First World War, but was pushed into the background by the development of the principle of individual criminal responsibility under international law after the Second World War. Jorgensen considers the history and merits of a concept that, it is argued, is currently on the threshold between lex ferenda and lex lata.

State Responsibility for the Support of Armed Groups in the Commission of International Crimes makes a case for the liberalisation of the tests of attribution of conduct of individuals to states under the rules of state responsibility in international law.

'State sovereignty' is often referred to as an obstacle to criminal justice for core international crimes by members of the international criminal justice movement. The exercise of State sovereignty is seen as a shield against effective implementation of such crimes. But it is sovereign States that create and become parties to international criminal law treaties and jurisdictions. They are the principal enforcers of criminal responsibility for international crimes, as reaffirmed by the complementarity principle on which the International Criminal Court (ICC) is based. Criminal justice for atrocities depends entirely on the ability of States to act. This volume revisits the relationship between State sovereignty and international criminal law along three main lines of inquiry. First, it considers the immunity of State officials from the exercise of foreign or international criminal jurisdiction. Secondly, with the closing down of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals, attention shifts to the exercise of national jurisdiction over core international crimes, making the scope of universal jurisdiction more relevant to perceptions of State sovereignty. Thirdly, could the amendments to the ICC Statute on the crime of aggression exacerbate tensions between the interests of State sovereignty and accountability? The book contains contributions by prominent international lawyers including Professor Christian Tomuschat, Judge Erkki Kourula, Judge LIU Daqun, Ambassador WANG Houli, Dr. ZHOU Lulu, Professor Claus Kre, Professor MA Chengyuan, Professor JIA Bingbing, Professor ZHU Lijiang and Mr. GUO Yang.