Individual Liability for Macrocriminality

Abstract

Macrocriminality or macro-criminal conduct has increasingly come to the attention of national and international criminal courts. However, the growing practical importance of prosecutions of international atrocity crimes has not been accompanied by the development of a sufficiently theorized and principled system of liability for macrocriminal conduct drawing on sufficiently sophisticated rules of imputation (or attribution). The case law so far has consisted of the practice and theory of the national law of the respective judges being read into the Statutes of the International Tribunals. Yet, while a system of imputation in international criminal law (ICL) may borrow its main elements and structures from domestic criminal law — ICL is, after all, criminal law on the supranational level — it must ultimately develop into an autonomous sui generis system duly taking into account the particularities of macrocriminal (as compared to ordinary) criminal conduct. But what are these 'particularities' from an empirical and theoretical perspective? And how do they play out in imputation as generally understood in criminal law theory? And how do they influence fundamental questions of imputation such as problems of causation, the forms of participation and subjective imputation? These are but a few, perhaps the 'big' questions of a theory of imputation in ICL which have recently been discussed during an international workshop held at Göttingen University and which is the object of a symposium to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of International Criminal Justice.