| | |  Editorials | Issues 
The Int'l Effort to Criminalize War
 The Real News Network
go to original
September 19, 2010
| | Debate about "wars of agression" at conference of jurists from international tribunals | |
At the end of August prosecutors from international tribunals such as those in Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and the Fmr. Yugoslavia met in Jamestown, NY for the 2010 International Humanitarian Law Dialogues. The discussion this year focused on the June review conference of the International Criminal Court in Kampala, Uganda.
• • •
The conference has been long awaited since the establishment of the court in 1998. The main issue was the definition of the crime of aggression. Now defined, it awaits ratification, postponed to 2017. If the International Criminal Court is given jurisdiction to prosecute it, it would essentially make all acts of aggressive war (that is not self-defense) illegal.
However, pressures from major military powers such as the U.S. ensured the definition of the crime allowed for any state to opt out of it being used against them. The Real News' Lia Tarachansky spoke with Benjamin B. Ferencz who attended the Kampala conference in Jamestown and retired South African judge Richard Goldstone about the crime of aggression and the fight to include it into the International Criminal Court.
Bio:
Benjamin B. Ferencz is a veteran of WWII who was also a Chief prosecutor in the 1945 Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. He has been consulting the International. He has been active in fighting for the establishment of the International Criminal Court and is the author of many books, among them Defining International Aggression - The Search for World Peace
Richard J. Goldstone is a retired South African supreme court judge. He was also the chief prosecutor in the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. Most recently, Judge Goldstone headed the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza conflict and authored alongside Christine Chinkin, Hina Jilani, and Colonel Desmond Travers the mission's report, also referred to as the Goldstone Report. |
|
| |
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us