The Law of War Crimes: National and International Approaches

Interest in the law of war crimes has resurged in the wake of several recent tragedies, including genocide in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and Pol Pot's killing fields in Cambodia. The Law of War Crimes is an important contribution in this field of renewed significance for international and domestic law and brings together a group of leading scholars and practitioners in international criminal law. This volume is the first in which a comprehensive analysis is undertaken of the law of war crimes in both national and international contexts.

In two introductory chapters, the editors discuss the philosophical and political implications of war crimes jurisprudence as well as the surprisingly rich and unexpected historical record of previous war crimes trials. A sequence of four chapters follows in which legislative and judicial approaches to war crimes in national settings are explored. These essays, on European, Israeli, Australian, and North American war crimes initiatives, contain a mass of indispensable new material and careful legal analysis. The concluding essays focus on war crimes regimes in international law In this section, the authors anticipate future developments, such as the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the proposed Permanent International Criminal Court, and revisit the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials from a contemporary perspective.