VOL. 2 | ED. 1
INTERNATIONAL FOCUS International criminal courts and internationalised criminal courts. Brief comparison
Whether international or in-
ternationalised, the activity of the criminal courts set up in the last decades with the help of the UN demonstrated that the concept of universal justice is not obsolete. In time, the international jurisdiction proved to be the most evolved mechanism for imposing international justice. Along with ad-hoc courts, an international permanent court (the International Criminal Court, or ‘ICC’) was created. I intend to sketch a short comparison between the international criminal courts and the internationalised, or hybrid courts with an emphasis on the practical advantages and disadvantages of forming and using one of these jurisdictions in order to try a certain violation of international humanitarian law or human rights. The second half of the 20th Century witnessed bloody inter-ethnic armed conflicts. To successfully end the civil wars, states were encouraged to ask for the intervention of a neutral party in trials involving violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. This is how ad-hoc tribunals developed a new subspecies, the hybrid criminal tribunal, adapted to both national and international circumstances. The mixed composition of these courts allowed them to possess relevant information from the local context, but also expertise in international humanitarian law. Brief History International criminal courts have their origins in the Common Act (1943) signed by the Allied Forces. The act set up two military courts in order to try and punish war criminals from National-Socialist Germany and Japan - the Nuremberg and Tokyo international criminal courts. The Nuremberg Charter incriminated several types of crimes: crimes against peace, crimes of war and, for the first time, crimes against humanity, as a separate juridical category. Later on, this innovation made the trials of the International Criminal Court
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for former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Court for Rwanda possible (Onica-Jarka, 2011, p. 157). The first permanent international court - the ICC - was established in 2002, as a consequence of the signing of a multilateral treaty, the Rome Statute, adopted during an UN conference. The competence of this Court is limited to the most serious crimes, such as crimes of aggression, crimes of war, crimes against humanity and genocide. The crimes against humanity and the war crimes are strictly determined in the Statute, in order to limit any interpretation. The Court has jurisdiction for crimes committed during both international and internal armed conflicts. The jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court has the aim of completing the national jurisdictions and it functions only in the cases in which the state on which territory the violation has occurred cannot or will not start a trial. The first ad-hoc court was the Court of Sierra Leone (CSSL), set up in 2002 by an international agreement between the Republic of Sierra Leone and the UN (Onica-Jarka, 2008, p. 178). The problem with ad-hoc courts is that, as a consequence of having a bilateral agreement instead of a multilateral one, the courts will not be preeminent over the national jurisdiction of third parties (other states) and will not be in position to give an order of extradition. However, the courts’ decisions are compulsory for the state which signed the agreement (in CSSL’s case, art. 8 of the Statute), a clear advantage in comparison with the courts of Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The obligation for Sierra Leone to cooperate with the CSSL at all levels of jurisdiction is stipulated in Article 17 of its Special Agreement, but the lack of power to oblige other states to comply has created many difficult situations. Such an example is the case of the Liberian president Charles Taylor, accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other grave violations of international humanitarian law by the CSSL and Ghana’s refusal to arrest him. In order to express its support for the ad-hoc Court and to encourage other states in