The Core Crimes of International Criminal Law
Forthcoming, Kevin Jon Heller, Frédéric Mégret, Sarah Nouwen, Jens David Ohlin and Darryl Robinson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (OUP 2018)
27 Pages Posted: 26 Jul 2018
Date Written: July 3, 2018
Abstract
The ‘core’ crimes enumerated in the Rome Statute - the crime of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and aggression - are overwhelmingly assumed to be the most important international crimes. In this chapter, I aim to unsettle this assumption by revealing and problematising the civilisational, political-economic, and aesthetical biases behind designating these crimes as ‘core’. This is done by shedding light on discontinuities in the history of the core crimes, and unsettling the progress narrative from Nuremberg to Rome. More specifically, crimes associated with drug control are placed in conversation with the accepted history of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to exemplify a systematic editing of the dominant narrative of international criminal law.
Keywords: core crimes, international criminal law, bias, drug trafficking crimes
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