While the inception of modern public international law heralded a revolutionary shift in law governing relations, the accountability of States, individuals and actors who engage in unlawful international conduct has often been alibied by a horizontal system of law which is unable to enforce consent to cooperate with treaties and charters. Unlike domestic law, which embodies an enforceable judiciary, legislature and executive, International law has no agency or organisation capable of mandatorily sentencing States for unlawful conduct. What it does have is the United Nations Charter – a set of rules and provisions with the primary intention to “regulate the relations” between independent States. Nevertheless, as indicated in Oppenheim’s International
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The genocide of the Tutsi minority of Rwanda only spanned for one-hundred days, yet the death toll amassed almost 1,000,000 people; where the vast majority were massacred with machetes. Consequently, to achieve this atrocity, much of the Hutu population were “implicated for this to succeed”. Predictably, this complicated the element of criminal responsibility. Moreover, contention surrounds the United Nation’s productive involvement in the State, as it was publically noted that “the UN and its Member States stood idly by…” as genocide transpired. Rwanda, like all States, as sovereignty to exercise political decisions within its jurisdiction . However, Rwanda was a signatory to the Geneva Convention on genocide of 1948 and therefore United Nations intervention was possible. It must therefore be considered, in the case of Rwanda, that there was a “limited influence” that the United Nations could enforce for the Hutu population committing the acts, as the “top leadership” of the Hutu government orchestrated the attacks. Additionally, many perpetrators fled to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada. With this said, the Geneva Convention of 1949 permits the enforceability of “search, arrest and prosecution” to be exercised internationally – which played a crucial role in not only the prosecution of many Hutu perpetrators, but the reform of domestic law in the States where these perpetrators fled (extradition and crimes against humanity). Following the Rwanda Genocide, the Geneva Convention established a Rwandan genocide tribunal. The case in Darfur, in the pursuit of Omar al-Bashir, the orchestrator of the genocide, the ICC imposed article 75 on the perpetrators of genocide to provide reparations to the victims of Darfur. Due to the fact that the ICC’s
The genocide of the Tutsi minority of Rwanda only spanned for one-hundred days, yet the death toll amassed almost 1,000,000 people; where the vast majority were massacred with machetes. Consequently, to achieve this atrocity, much of the Hutu population were “implicated for this to succeed”. Predictably, this complicated the element of criminal responsibility. Moreover, contention surrounds the United Nation’s productive involvement in the State, as it was publically noted that “the UN and its Member States stood idly by…” as genocide transpired. Rwanda, like all States, as sovereignty to exercise political decisions within its jurisdiction . However, Rwanda was a signatory to the Geneva Convention on genocide of 1948 and therefore United Nations intervention was possible. It must therefore be considered, in the case of Rwanda, that there was a “limited influence” that the United Nations could enforce for the Hutu population committing the acts, as the “top leadership” of the Hutu government orchestrated the attacks. Additionally, many perpetrators fled to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada. With this said, the Geneva Convention of 1949 permits the enforceability of “search, arrest and prosecution” to be exercised internationally – which played a crucial role in not only the prosecution of many Hutu perpetrators, but the reform of domestic law in the States where these perpetrators fled (extradition and crimes against humanity). Following the Rwanda Genocide, the Geneva Convention established a Rwandan genocide tribunal. The case in Darfur, in the pursuit of Omar al-Bashir, the orchestrator of the genocide, the ICC imposed article 75 on the perpetrators of genocide to provide reparations to the victims of Darfur. Due to the fact that the ICC’s