hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
Universal criminal jurisdiction (UJ) has had an impressive, even turbulent, career during the last two decades. From a historical oddity dealing with piracy, it has recently made its way to the forefront of the prosecution of the most serious international crimes – including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Nowadays not a week goes by without news about another UJ case being opened or another UJ judgment being rendered. Despite its recent upsurge, many questions about the nature, legitimacy, and administration of universal criminal jurisdiction remain unanswered – and partly even unasked.
One main reason is that UJ finds itself at the multidimensional “crossroads” of multiple legal sub-disciplines (international vs. criminal law), spheres (international vs. domestic law), domains (substantive vs. procedural law), and rationales of attribution (state vs. individual responsibility). While UJ has been mainly scrutinized by international law theorists, the materialization of universal jurisdiction in a growing number of ongoing cases challenges both domestic criminal justice systems and the international legal order. We should seize this opportunity to comprehensively address UJ in legal scholarship, connect international and domestic debates, and develop a systematic and multidimensional approach for questioning and conceptualizing the phenomenon of UJ for international crimes.
