Abstract

The article is dedicated to the overview of the scope and application of international prosecution on war crimes. Although theterm “war crimes” is not a new concept in international law, different approaches exist in defining the precise limits of it. War crimesare always considered as one of the primary challenges and pecularities minimizing the whole efficiency of international law. Nevertheless,not all known prosecutions on war crimes ended with success. In traditional international law war crimes are always related tomilitary or armed conflicts what may be international or non-international conflict. History of international humanitarian law demonstratesthat almost all of the military conflicts were associated with war crimes. However, international law was not able to buil upstrong judicial mechanisms for the prosecution of war crimes for a long time. Modern type of international prosecution over war crimescan be linked to military tribunals established after World War I. At the same time, we should not forget that most of war crimes committedbefore and during WWI still remain unpunished. These problems demand new conceptual approach to the understanding of warcrimes as well as methodology of international prosecution. We know that first military tribunals were of quasi-international character.Although modern international law contains fully international military tribunals, still there are a lot of cases of failure to punish warcrimes. We need to understand that being a type of international crimes against peace and humanity, war crimes can be committed outsidethe active period of war. Thus, there is a need to re-define again the scope and subject matter of war crimes. On the other hand,prosecution of war crimes should be studied apart from other international law violations, human rights in particular.

Highlights

  • To sum up all the normative frameworks, I can say that war crimes is a broad legal category, covering serious violations of international humanitarian law in times of armed conflict, both international and non-international

  • As a result of the above noted, I can say that war crimes is still one of the challengeable topics of international law

  • I think that the current study of war crimes combines life-long problems related to the detection, analysis and punishment in international level

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Summary

A.V. AllAHVErDİYEV

DEFINING WAR CRIMES: A LOOK TO THE PROSECUTION BY INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL JUDICIAL BODIES. We may appreciate that the Yugoslav Tribunal has made great strides, likening it to a light in a dark tunnel These are the successes that: – “Transition from impunity to responsibility”, which until recently was the only judicial crime committed in the context of the Yugoslav conflict, because prosecutors in the former Yugoslavia did not want to commit such crimes at all; – “Fact-finding”, which contains a large amount of information about the fact that the tribunal has resolved the case and its long-term consequences; – “Ensuring the justice of thousands of victims and their right to vote”, which represents the majority of witnesses before the court; – “Achievement in International Law”, which describes the concretization of a number of concepts of international law that are not governed by Nuremberg; – “Strengthening the Rule of Law”, which discusses the role of the Tribunal in promoting the application of international standards in war crimes in the former Yugoslav republics. According to the authors of research in this field, war crimes, which are considered a special type of international law, have a number of features (violation of the laws and customs of war; accompanied by military violence against civilians and human security; non-compliance; international legal liability for its commission).[17]

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