The Criminal Responsibility of Individuals for Violations of International Humanitarian Law by Elies Van Sliedregt. The Hague, The Netherlands: T.M.C. Asser Press. 2003. PP. XXIV, 437. $110. Hardback. ISBN: 90-6704-166-1.

AuthorDaniel C. Turack
PositionProfessor of Law, Capital University Law School
Pages525-528

Page 525

It has taken centuries for the principle of individual criminal responsibility to evolve in national law. The concept that a person is only culpable to the extent of his own free will or guilty mind can be traced to canonical law and the insights of Italian jurists in the Renaissance. Today, the national concept of individual criminal responsibility is represented by recognition of the concept's emancipation from collective responsibility, the release from immunity of state officials who previously relied on release based on the Act of State doctrine. As to international individual criminal responsibility, culpability was recognized and applied by the first generation of international criminal tribunals, namely the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals in the early post-World War II era.

The second generation of international criminal tribunals carried forward individual culpability with respect to international criminal law in the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Evolution of individual criminal responsibility is carried on in the codification-process of international criminal law in the adoption of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which has created a permanent criminal forum, potentially with universal reach, on July 1, 2002.

Nuremberg's International Military Tribunal represented the starting point of modern war crimes law on the international level in holding individual war criminals responsible for international crimes; it ended the Act of State doctrine previously claimed as immunity by government officials to escape criminal liability for international crimes. The laws of war or armed conflict also included humanitarian interests, and from the international war crimes law there has now developed a separate, but related, body of international humanitarian law that is now a branch of the international criminal law.

This book is divided into three parts plus an epilogue. Part I, entitled "Modes of Individual Responsibility," provides an historical survey of both collective criminality theory and individual responsibility. As individual criminal responsibility for violation of internationalPage 526humanitarian law (IHL) was already accepted with the Treaty of Versailles and the trial of Kaiser Wilhelm II after World War I, it was based on a factual outlook. The Nuremberg Tribunal did not clearly...

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