1. International Criminal Law (ICL) and Human Right abuses.
Student number: 434744 for Milton and 44555 for Urman
Overview and Introduction
• International criminal proceeding following world war II are credited with the launching of the
modern regime of international criminal Law (ICL).It date back for centuries and across the
globe in particular ICL draw on a four main stands of international law history in the nineteenth
century prohibited against piracy, the subsequent regulation of slavery and the slave trade, the
once theological and later secular theory of the just war and international Humanitarian Law
(IHL) or the Law of war. in the terminology of Dan-Cohn ,the ICL had conducted rules without
corresponding enforcement rules. the Jus Ad Bellum which manifested an ‘extreme pacifism ‘
that prohibited participation in war. Efforts to identify the necessary condition for war
constitute the jus(or ius) ad bellum however this shift in emphasis from jus ad bellum to jus in
bello. international law typically governs the rights and responsibilities of states criminal law
conversely, is paradigmatically concerned with prohibitions addressed to individuals, violation of
which are subject to penal sanction by a state: The development of a body of international
criminal law which imposes responsibilities directly on individuals and punishes violation
through international mechanism is relatively recent. Although there are historical precursors
and precedents of and in international criminal law, it was not until the 1990s, with the
establishment of the ad hoc Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, that it could be said
that an international criminal law regime had evolved. This is a relatively new body of law, which
is not yet uniform nor are its courts universal. International criminal law developed from various
sources. War crimes originate from the 'laws and customs of war’, which accord certain
protection to individuals in armed conflicts. Genocide and crime against humanity evolved to
protect persons from what are now often termed gross human right abuses, including those
committed by their own governments. With the possible exception of the crime of aggression
with it focus on inter-state conflict, the concern of international criminal law is now with
individual and with their protection from wide-scale atrocities. As was said by the Appeal
Chamber in the Tadic case in the international criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia(ICTY)
• Human rights protection through the means of criminal prosecution is still a more or less
developing concept which continues to suffer from severe shortcoming and obstacles- for
example, the doctrine of functional immunity of serving head of state and other officials limits
the exercise of the principle of universal criminal jurisdiction, the chronic lack of resources and
means of effective prosecution , the difficult and sometimes nonexistent judicial cooperation in
criminal matters, the often apparent reluctance of individual sate to assist in prosecution of
perpetrator of international crimes( as highlighted by the difficulties encountered by the two ad
hoc tribunals)the inherent question whether they resemble forums of selective justice and the
limited scope of international criminal court’s (ICC) ratione materiae and the supplementary
nature of its jurisdiction. It is doubtful whether a universal system of individual criminal
accountability with a corpus of uniform rules of the necessary deterrence can be developed. The
establishment of an international regime of strict individual civil liability for the commission of

2. international core crimes and other acts of gross human right violation in the addition of the
existing ways and means of human right protection might well prove to be a solution to existing
shortcoming it should be bore in mine that International human rights law and international
humanitarian law are both part of international law although there are significant differences
between the two branches of IL, they are interrelated in protecting the rights of individuals and
on the other flip site of the con is to enforce in addition to state responsibility, individual
tribunals( or courts, ad hoc or permanent)
In this is chapter we will focus our attention on the aspect of selective justice in regards to the
execution of saddam Hussein and the cases of rape