International Criminal Tribunals

Since 1993, several international criminal tribunals have been established, promoting international criminal law as a growing discipline. In 1993–1994, the ad hoc criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) were set up, and since 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been accepting cases. In contrast to the ICTY and ICTR, meant to try international crimes that occurred during a particular period and were committed within a certain region, the ICC is permanent, and its jurisdiction encompasses genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression.

Unlike the ICTY and ICTR, which are based on a resolution of the United Nations (UN) Security Council, the ICC is based on a treaty concluded in 1998 in Rome among 120 states. This rather complex and detailed international treaty provided, for the first time in history, for the creation of a permanent international criminal court (strongly influenced by the events that took place during World War II, the subsequent Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and experience of the ICTY and ICTR). It provides the court with power to try and punish the most serious international crimes based on complementarity, that is, in the event that national justice systems fail to bring about justice regarding the crimes in question.

Since 2002, a new concept emerged within international criminal law: the phenomenon of ad hoc internationalized or mixed courts for prosecuting international crimes and restoring justice in certain regions of the world. The terms mixed and internationalized relate both to the mixed nature of the applicable rules and to the judges who have to apply these rules. Unlike the judiciary of the ICTY, ICTR, and ICC (each of which is composed of purely international judges), the bench of these mixed courts is composed of national and international judges, and justice is administered on the basis of a combination of national and international criminal law. In recent years, confronted with emergency situations involving the commission of atrocities, the international legal community has preferred not to subject these cases either to domestic courts or to a purely international criminal court, but has opted for a court that is mixed in composition and rules. Four such mixed courts were established in different parts of the world:

• 1.
  Sierra Leone: The Special Court for Sierra Leone, the statute of which was adopted in 2002, after an agreement between the UN and the government of Sierra Leone.
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• 2.
  Cambodia: The so-called Extraordinary Chambers, established in 2001 by Cambodia's Parliament to deal with crimes committed during the period of the Khmer Rouge.
• 3.
  East Timor: The Special Panels for Serious Crimes were established in 2000 by the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor as mixed panels within the district courts of Dili, with exclusive jurisdiction over “serious criminal offences.”
• 4.
  Kosovo: The UN provisional administration passed a regulation on the appointment of international judges to serve on Kosovar courts, and those judges were appointed in 2000.

Jurists active in the international legal community believe that such mixed courts are likely to restore peace and justice in a more legitimate way than the national courts could. The independence of the trial before internationalized courts seems more secure than in national court systems, where the judges were often victims of the conflict in question.

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