Crimes against Humanity in the Modern Age

Despite the promises made after World War II to eliminate the commission of atrocities, crimes against humanity persist with horrifying ubiquity. Yet the absence of a consistent definition and uniform interpretation of crimes against humanity has made it difficult to establish the theory underlying such crimes and to prosecute them in particular cases. In the 1990s, several ad hoc international criminal tribunals were established to respond to the commission of atrocity crimes, including crimes against humanity, in specific regions of the world in conflict. Building on this legacy, in 1998 a new institution—the International Criminal Court (ICC)— was established to take up the task of defining crimes against humanity and other atrocity crimes and preventing and punishing their commission. Over the next few years, the ad hoc tribunals will complete their mandates. It is widely assumed that the ICC will then be the world’s only functioning international criminal jurisdiction. Given the centrality of charges of crimes against humanity to the successful prosecution of atrocity crimes, the ICC’s treatment of crimes against humanity will therefore be critically important. Moreover, because the ICC is a permanent court with the capacity to intervene in ongoing situations (even prior to the outbreak of conflict in some cases), the Court’s prosecutions of crimes against humanity may assume a preventive role at the ICC that similar prosecutions could never have assumed at the ad hoc tribunals. Because crimes against humanity may be prosecuted in peacetime, they may serve as the predicate for ICC intervention before war and its accompanying atrocities completely overwhelm a civilian population. Indeed, crimes against humanity prosecutions have quickly emerged as central to the ability of the ICC to fulfill its mandate. As of this writing, crimes against humanity have been charged in all seven of the situations currently being prosecuted at the Court. Moreover, in the Kenya, Libya, and Côte d’Ivoire situations, crimes against humanity currently provide the only possible basis for