War and War Crimes: The Military, Legitimacy and Success in Armed Conflict The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials

摘要

The last two decades have seen extraordinary developments in international criminal taw, with the expansion of claims of universal jurisdiction, a profusion of special tribunals to respond to particular crises - most famously, the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR)-and the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC). These attempts to expand the scope of international law have not gone unchallenged - China, India, Russia and the US are not among the 123 states currently party to the Statute of the ICC, for example - but in Europe, Latin America and much of Africa a new approach to ending impunity for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes holds sway. The two books under consideration here are explicitly oriented towards the problems generated by one of these categories, that of 'war crimes', but in practice they also end up saying something about the other two international crimes; in the process they make it clear that ending impunity is not as simple a task as one might imagine.