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AGGRESSION ȃ THE SUPREME INTERNATIONAL CRIME OR NOT A CRIME AT ALL?
within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.
87
Even prior to the post-WWII trials,
in 1919, the Versailles Treaty arraigned the former German emperor William II
“for a
supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties”
(Article 227(1)).
Interpreting the article, the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau wrote that
“the war which began on August 1st 1914, was the greatest crime against humanity and the
freedom of peoples that any nation, calling itself civilised, has ever consciously committed”.
88
In a similar vein, the UN General Assembly declared in 1950 that
“any aggression
/…/
is the gravest of all crimes against peace and security throughout the world”.
89
References to
aggression as the gravest/supreme crime appear also in more recent scholarly literature
relating to the Rome Statute and to certain military interventions (especially the US
intervention to Iraq in 2003).
90
The qualificationmight be largely true in political andmoral terms. Acts of aggression
often result in large-scale armed conflicts that cost lives of millions of people and cause
enormous human suffering. The bloodiest ever conflict in human history, World War II
(1939–1945), which produced over 50 million victims, begun with a series of acts of
aggression carried out by Nazi Germany. The recognition that aggressive war is a serious
threat to mankind that can only be suppressed by international cooperation is built into
the system of the United Nations. One of the main purposes of the UN is to
“maintain
international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for /…/ for
the suppression of acts of aggression”
[Article 2(1) of the UN Charter]. Historical experience
also shows that aggressive wars create conditions which are conducive to the commission
of the other international crimes – genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
While these crimes, with the exception of war crimes, can take place outside the context
of armed conflicts as well, these conflicts typically set the scene for them.
This, however, does not make the crime of aggression into the supreme international
crime in legal terms. As Schabas rightly notes, the Rome Statute
“does not propose any
formal hierarchy among the four categories of crimes”.
91
The same applies to customary
international law. The scholarly initiatives aimed at introducing hierarchy into the
system mostly aim at making it possible to arrange offences according to their gravity
within
the categories of international crimes, not
between
these categories.
92
This
87
Cit. in
Historical Review of Developments relating to Aggression, op. cit
, p. 8.
88
Cit. in GREEN, L. C.:
The Contemporary Law of Armed Conflict,
Manchester University Press, Manchester,
1993, p. 4.
89
UN Doc. A/RES/380 (V),
Peace Through Deeds,
17 November 1950, par. 1.
90
See, for instance, KRAMER, R., MICHALOWSKI, R., ROTHE, D.: “The Supreme International
Crime”: How the U.S. War in Iraq Threatens the Rule of Law,
Social Justice, 2005,
Vol. 32, No. 2,
pp. 52-81; and ZAYAS, A. de: Peace as a Human Rights. The Prohibition of Aggression in International
Law,
Geneva Post Quarterly,
2008, Vol. 3, No. 1, p. 1.
91
SCHABAS, W. A.:
An Introduction to the International Criminal Court
, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2011, p. 25.
92
See DANNER, A. M.: Constructing a Hierarchy of Crimes in International Criminal Law Sentencing,
Virginia Law Review,
2001, Vol. 87, No. 3, pp. 415-501.