Free Law Dissertations - To What Extent Terrorist Offences Can Qualify As An International Crime
To what extent terrorist offences can qualify as an international crime under the jurisdiction of the International criminal court?
Introduction
Terrorism is without doubt an atrocity that is on the rise. In 2000, Alexander reported an increase in frequency of 300 recorded attacks in 1970, to over 5,000 in 1999. The increase is as a result of a clear utilization of this form of aggression for various conflicts. Examples include Northern Ireland and the IRA, for which an official end to the violent campaign was only announced on July 28th 2005 as well as Palestine and Israel for which the Gaza strip was just emptied of its settlers as recently as August 15th and 16th of August, 2005 and many countries contain terrorist groups that their governments have tried to combat, including Turkey, Spain and Columbia. During the timeframe of the above statistic, there took place huge atrocities that remain etched in the minds of those who are able to remember them, and they include the Lockerbie Disaster, the Oklahoma Bombing, Bloody Sunday, the Omar Bombing and many others. Since 1999, there has been even more suicide bombing in Israel, the London Bombings that killed over fifty people on July 7th 2005, the Madrid Bombing and, by far the greatest atrocity of terrorism, September 11th. It is clear that terrorism, as a global threat to civil societies, requires to be dealt with under the framework of a workable international jurisdiction.
In 1998, proposals were made to create a new International Criminal Court that would tackle the greatest of human atrocities but it was largely inspired by the acts of Genocide in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, as well as the crimes against humanity in Yugoslavia, for which the UN had established ad hoc Criminal Courts to deal with the crimes committed by Slobodan Miloševic, among others. The Rome Statute on the International Criminal Court was therefore signed by UN States on July 17th 1998 to establish a permanent seat in the Hague and came into force on July 1st 2002.
This paper will examine the extent to which terrorist offences can qualify as an international crime under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) by first of all, in part one, analysing the jurisdiction of the ICC under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Part two will provide a detailed analysis that will ascertain the provisions and the extent of the Rome Statute’s ability to account for terrorism within the existing wording of the ICC’s relevant jurisdictional headings. Part three will provide a counter-analysis to identify the limitations and inadequacies of construing current ICC jurisdiction and, in doing so, will provide arguments for amendment of the Rome Statute to include express inclusion of terrorist offences.
Part One - The definition of terrorism compared with the Jurisdiction ofthe ICC under the Rome Statute
A.Is there a definition of Terrorism?
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