Perpetrators of international crimes can be found at all levels. From the president or prime minister down to district governors or mayors of cities and towns. Individual criminal responsibility applies in principle equally to all, irrespective of their rank or authority. But equal prosecution is often impossible, in light of the sheer number of crimes and perpetrators. International criminal courts and tribunals, therefore tend to concentrate on leadership accountability involving the masterminds or the intellectual authors of crime. The focus on leadership accountability has merits and downsides. Targeting elites has a strong symbolic effects. It may disrupt existing power structures that facilitate the crime. It may further bestow a sense of equality between victims and perpetrators. But it also has negative effects. Going after the leadership, requires significant evidence. The costs of failure are high. A failed trial, may easily derail the legitimacy of a justice process. Immediate victims of crime often wish to see their neighbor tried as much as they seek accountability for co-leaders. Our coming discussion on individual criminal responsibility will divided over two videos. Part 1 will explore the individualization of responsibility. The second part of our discussion will focus on the accountability of individuals for collective forms of action. The current focus on individualization can only be understood from the past. The very idea that individuals hold obligations under international law was long recognized before World War II. But typically, only states could be held accountable for violations committed by their agents. The Nuremberg judgement marked a tipping point. It affirmed the capacity of individuals to commit crimes. And most fundamentally, the distinction between the responsibility of states and the responsibility of individuals. It held that crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities and that only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes, can the provisions of international law be enforced. The principle of individual criminal responsibility has particular importance In mass atrocity contexts. It seeks to prevent formal assignment of blame or guilt to collectivities, such as entire nations, societies or whole ethnic and religious groups. This rationale was inparticular invoked by the Yugoslavia Tribunal. It treated international criminal justice as an instrument to mitigate feelings of resentment, hatred, and frustration. Individualization, is at the same time open to a number of critiques. International crimes rely heavily on contextual elements, such as collective plans or policies or context of the oppression. And individual charged of international crimes may therefore easily become a scapegoat of collective action. Secondly, one of the dangers of a strict focus on individualized guilt and institutional responses is that it may contribute to a myth of collective innocence, or detract from the broader structural factors that explain crime. International criminal justice differs from the domestic system in relation to the nature of violence. Domestic systems are typically concerned with interpersonal violence. International crimes are committed in a collective context, which requires multiple faults of human interaction. Theorists still struggle to understand why persons engage in such crimes. A prominent theory to explain collective criminology is a theory of crimes of obedience. It argues that crimes result from incentives to follow and obey certain rules, role models or values. The theory is irrelevant for international crimes, because many of these crimes may be explained by relationships of power. Certain crimes may be explained by classical hierarchies and chains of authority as found in military and paramilitary groups, governmental bureaucracies, or business structures. Others result from group dynamics or conformity pressures, such as professional role models. Finally, some crimes are simply crimes of conviction. They're oriented towards a certain re-orientation of values. The commission of international crimes involves several levels of responsibility. Leadership actors who exercise control through decision making power, agents who plan, organize, or manage the implementation, and those who execute. The most serious violations, may be committed by those who posses real political power, or orchestrate the violations, and not necessarily by those who execute the crime. A good example is the case of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann organized the deportation of the Jews. But he was not directly involved in any act of murder. Most would agree that he carries a particular high degree of blame worthiness, despite his detachment from the scene of the crime. In more recent jurisprudence, for example in the Tadic case, the Yugoslavia tribunal held specifically that the moral gravity of acts of participation is often no less or indeed no different from that of those actually carrying out the act in question. So we've seen that it is relatively easy to establish indicators relating to crimes. One of the main challenges of international criminal justice, is to allocate responsibility. The idea of accountability is primarily taught to the individual. But this individualization contrasts with the collective nature of violence. Allocating responsibility poses an attractable tension. Nearly to individualize evil that destruction. In the second part of our discussion on individual criminal responsibility, we will discuss under what circumstances an individual may be held accountable as perpetrator for collective forms of action.
