The Globalization of State Crime

Abstract

States have need of laws, including international laws, and yet states, or their agents, claim the prerogative to reinterpret, rewrite or even transgress the law — where necessity dictates. For this reason, state crimes are entirely absent from the corpus of international criminal law — as they are from domestic criminal codes (Bassiouni, 2011, loc. 248). Even the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) implies individual and not state criminal liability. Unlike civil law, where responsibility can be apportioned and penalties imposed upon state and corporate entities, responsibility for criminal acts committed in the name of the state is individuated so that individual culprits can be identified, isolated and punished, but not the institutions they represent. Yet, the concept of state crime enjoys wide currency among international jurists, political scientists, criminologists and humanitarians. The terms “pariah state,” “narco-state” and “state sponsor of terrorism” surface in official security discourse to justify punitive actions against “rogue” foreign governments. The “failed state” is a special category of political deviance, where, under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm, the rights and privileges of sovereignty are abrogated because “national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” (emphasis added) (UNGA, 2005, p. 31).