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International Criminal Court : An International Tribunal Focused On International Crime

Decent Essays

The International Criminal Court in Den Haag, known as the ICC is the first, and only, permanent international tribunal focused specifically on international crime. Originally established in 2002, the ICC was established with the responsibility of investigating, charging, and prosecuting individuals suspected of ordering or committing genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
ICC was established with the adoption of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in at a diplomatic conference in 1998. The Rome Statute is a treaty that called for the establishment of an international criminal court. This was not the first attempt to establish an international tribunal focused on international crime. To be sure, the first international criminal tribunals were established in Germany and Japan after World War II to prosecute Nazi and Japanese leaders suspected of genocide and war crimes. Moreover, in recent decades, a number of other international criminal tribunals were established after conflicts in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Cambodia and Lebanon (Luban et al. 2010). The purpose of the international criminal court called for in the Rome Statute, however, differs from all prior international criminal tribunals in a number of important aspects. First, whereas the other courts ended or will eventually end at some point in the future when there are no more cases to heard or issues to be resolved; as mentioned, the statute sought a permanent court

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