International System of Justice - Essay Example

Until recently, these atrocities and affronts to ideals of humanity went unpunished by national judicial systems and there was urgent need to put in place a system of justice that would protect the international human rights as enshrined in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration on Human Rights (Roht-Arriaza, 1995). The decade was marked by the creation of international criminal justice mechanisms and the application of a universal jurisdiction that would ensure that those who participate in crimes against humanity are held to account for their actions.

Due to inherent obstacles in applying justice for such crimes, the mechanisms developed have continued to be marred with failure despite the numerous strides that have been experienced. After the Cold War period and the horrific acts that took place in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda coupled with the miserable failures of national courts of justice to bring perpetrators of crimes against humanity to account for their acts, major international actors including the United Nations (UN), a number of governments and international nongovernmental (NGOs) organizations came up to form international criminal courts. . In1998, the United Nations adopted the Statute that would lead to the creation of a permanent International Criminal Court as a complementary to national courts of justice with the mandate to act in cases where the national courts are unable or unwilling to investigate and/or prosecute (Schabas, 2007; Schiff, 2008).

It is important to note that the concept of international system of justice include standards governing rendering of justice to all on an international scale and the conduct of war and standards that define the fundamental human rights. Most of these requirements of have achieved a degree of recognition internationally over the past few decades in defining the types of criminal conduct by states against other states or against individuals or ethnic groups. In this regard, the varied definitions of violent crime between countries due to dissimilarities in both legal and statistics recording methods have made international comparisons problematic.

The law of armed or violent conflict has generally been applied to define conflict between states with little or no attention to internal armed conflict. However, there have been some developments in international law to especially through the Geneva Conventions to protect civilians during internal armed violence (Moir, 2002) International Criminal Court and Universal Jurisdiction With international criminal law infiltrating the legal systems of many states, the principle of complementarity, which stipulates the only subsidiary competence of the ICC vis-a-vis national jurisdictions, comes to be seen as one of the most important features of the ICC Statute (Schabas, 2007; Bellamy, 2009).

The principle of