I have found the readings for this lesson quite
interesting. I would like to start my reflection saying that the issue of
international justice is a concept of a quite new introduction in our
contemporary history. In the aftermath of the end of the Second World War, it
started to be clear that States were not able alone by themselves to guarantee
the respect of fundamental human rights of their citizens. For this, reason at
the international level the issue of protecting individuals became more
important and a lot of work was did both thanks to the so-called hard law
as well as thanks to the soft law. Therefore, on one side exists a huge number of
treaties and documents aimed at the protection of individuals, but from the
other they are not enough because often they cannot prevent the violation of
human rights or perpetration of crimes by State authorities or criminals. Still,
it is not yet clear if individuals can be considered subjects of the
international law or not, but for sure we can say that there is a clear
tendency in considering them as such. Two examples of this trend can be saw in
the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
in 1993, and the one for the Rwanda in 1994, both conceived to put an end to
the genocide and mass violations of human rights that were ongoing in those
countries at that time.
While reading the materials were firstly: is there a
universal jurisdiction and If it so, can it be defined as the accountability
for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity? What about the existence
of a universal jurisdiction?
I think that a clear step forward in the issue of
international justice was made when the International Criminal Court (ICC)
started functioning after the entered into force of the Roman Statute on July
2002. The work of the International Criminal Court has been criticized for
being too focused on the criminal crimes in Africa then elsewhere as well as to
be a tool in the hand of the western imperialism. Is it true or is just a
narrative followed by the scholars who are not in favour of a broader concept
of justice nor moreover to let the power of judging to a defined international
body?
I think is a quite complicated issue and for that it
is difficult to deal with. Indeed, there are a lot of questions that come to my
mind, like: what are now the challenges that the International Criminal Court
has to face? What is the role of the other criminal tribunals in relation to
the ICC? What should be done in order to assure and grant worldwide the respect
of fundamental rights?
I hope that in the upcoming lesson some of these questions
will be answered or will give space to the debate.
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