International criminal law as an instrument of international human rights policy has accelerated since the end of the Cold War. Ad hoc international criminal tribunals for the human rights atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia have led to the new International Criminal Court that now sits in The Hague, despite trenchant US opposition to it. A growing corpus of international criminal and human rights law and policy - treaties, declarations, conventions and international customary law –is influencing international and national prosecutions of egregious human rights abuses. This course will examine this growing field of international law, and consider the ethical and political implications of international criminal law courts and tribunals upon: notions of sovereignty; the legal approach effects of politics and religious and cultural practices that differ from western approaches; and the use of universal jurisdiction within domestic courts to prosecute crimes that take place outside sovereign boundaries.
