Responsibility for Atrocity: Individual Criminal Agency and the International Criminal Court

This chapter is concerned with the shift in international political and
legal discourse away from assigning responsibility for political violence to
states, and towards assigning criminal responsibility to individuals, in
particular with the establishment, in 1998, of the International Criminal Court
(lCC). This new Court is premised on assumptions that there are universal
moral standards which apply to human behaviour, and that by assigning
responsibility to individuals and inflicting punishment according to these
standards, the international criminal justice system (lCJS) can deter crime,
end conflict and bring about justice. The chapter takes seriously these goals,
but questions the ability of the system to achieve them - and raises the
question of whether the ICJS may in fact encourage atrocity by enabling state
violence. It examines the move from state civil agency to individual criminal
agency within international legal discourse, the limited and internally
contradictory conception of international agency necessary to sustain this
move and the uneasy relationship between morality, politics and law
conceived by the framers of international criminal law, before considering the
implications of the new system.