International Criminal Court / Crime of Aggression

State Aggression is Finally a Crime ... But How is it Punished?
By Chandra Lekha Sriram
The Guardian, June 14, 2010
"The crime of state-to-state aggression was discussed at the review conference of the international criminal court (ICC), which I attended in Uganda last week. It reminded me of the classic description of US political dealmaking in action: like watching sausages being made. Various options were sliced and diced, sometimes beyond recognition, and the result was not necessarily attractive. The convenor of the working group on aggression, Prince Zeid of Jordan, sought to find consensus, or at least promote compromise, among divergent state and non-state parties speaking in the working group. As the debates wore on, the plenary discussions were repeatedly suspended in order to facilitate bilateral and smaller multilateral negotiations. Plenary sessions were held past midnight on Thursday and Friday, with a final agreement secured early on Saturday morning. The result, in short, was a definition of a crime, but no operative mechanism for punishing it. The stakes could not have been higher in discussions that could result in adding aggression to the list of crimes over which the ICC can exercise jurisdiction. ... Yet the discussion in Kampala nearly obscured the importance of addressing aggression in a slow, complex deliberation of what appear to be technical legal issues. [...]"