The International Criminal Court and the Crime of Aggression

Sammanfattning: The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute) was signed 17 July 1998. It will be a permanent court that will have jurisdiction over crimes in potentially all States. The defendants will not be States, but individuals. Among the four crimes listed in Rome Statute the crime of aggression was the most contentious. The issue of aggression and efforts to deter the use of force has been raised in various treaties, resolutions and cases in history, not least in the twentieth century. States have been found to commit acts of aggression and in some cases the international community has reacted in joint efforts, as against Iraq in the previous decade. However, only at one time in history individuals have been tried for a similar crime, during the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials in the aftermath of the Second World War. The informal consultations of the Rome Conference did not bring the delegations to an agreement on how to include the crime in the statute. Several States from the non-aligned movement advocated that the Security Council should not have any role in relation to the crime of aggression. The permanent members of the Security Council regarded the involvement of the Security Council as a necessary condition for the inclusion of the crime in the statute. Article 5 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states: "&semicThe Court shall exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression once a provision is adopted in accordance with article 121 and 123 defining the crime and setting out the conditions under which the Court shall exercise jurisdiction with respect to this crime. Such a provision shall be consistent with the relevant provisions of the Charter of the United Nations."&semic The issue is currently under discussion between States in the Preparatory Commission of the International Criminal Court. The objective of the thesis is to describe the different solutions and to provide a proposal on how to define the crime of aggression and solve the issue of jurisdiction. The solution chosen with low involvement of the Security Council and high thresholds for its application has been measured against three interests&semic to what degree it fulfils the requirement of fair trial and respect for human rights, how coherent it is with the surrounding legal system, and if it is close enough to the opinion of the States.