tional crimes. However, a central attribute of the ICC is that it will be complementary to national criminal jurisdictions. Thus, national tribunals will continue to have
primary jurisdiction over criminal offences falling under the Statute, and the ICC
will hear cases only where national tribunals are unable or unwilling to do so.248
Article 25 of the ICC Statute establishes individual criminal responsibility for any
person who commits a crime within the jurisdiction of the ICC. The Statute also
addresses command responsibility and the full range of possible defences.249 The
ICC will be formally established after 60 countries have ratified the Rome Statute
of the International Criminal Court.250 It will have jurisdiction only over crimes
committed after the Statute’s entry into force, and in the case of States which
adhere after that point, only for crimes committed after the Statute’s entry into
force for those States, unless the latter declare otherwise. Articles 12 and 13 set
out certain other conditions for the exercise of jurisdiction.
4.2. The Convention in Relation to the International
Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia
and Rwanda
Since the prosecutions of war criminals after the end of the Second World War,
no prosecutions before international tribunals occurred until the advent of the
respective tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the1990s. Both the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) were created by UN Security
Council resolutions.
The Statute of the ICTY (hereafter: “the ICTY Statute”) limits the Tribunal’s jurisdiction to serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the
former Yugoslavia since 01 January 1991.251 Articles 2 through 5 set forth the
crimes over which the Tribunal has jurisdiction: war crimes, genocide, and other
crimes against humanity. The Statute’s rules concerning individual responsibility
and defences are generally consistent with the Nuremberg principles and the
1949 Geneva Conventions and Protocol I.252
The Tribunal’s personal jurisdiction extends only to natural persons and is concurrent with that of national courts, although, importantly, it enjoys primacy and
may request that a national court defer to its jurisdiction over a case.253
Torture is a crime under the ICTY Statute in the context of grave breaches of the
Geneva Conventions254 and crimes against humanity.255
III. THEMATIC SUMMARY OF SOME CENTRAL ISSUES PERTAINING TO THE CONVENTION
4. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CONVENTION AND OTHER INSTRUMENTS OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW
It is possible to imagine a situation where torture committed in the context of a
conflict also falls within the definition of torture in both the Convention and
international humanitarian law. In that case, national tribunals could have a
choice between prosecuting a suspect according to laws establishing jurisdiction
according to the Convention against Torture or according to the norms of individual criminal responsibility under international humanitarian law.
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