The Elements of Crime of Genocide in the Provisions of the International Court of Justice and the Special International Criminal Tribunals (Comparative Study)

Abstract

Genocide is considered as one of the most heinous international crimes that some have referred to it as the crime of all crimes because it represents an attack against the most basic value the penal code seeks to protect, i.e. the maintaining of human race and providing it with protecting against any form of aggression. The main international document that deals with this crime is the The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. However there are some gaps in this instrument and this might include the difficulty of proving the intention as the convention stipulates the existence of a special intent for perpetrating genocide. But intent is a psychological factor that is hard if not impossible to verify in most of the cases. One other gap is that convention does not provide for a definition of the population or group of people that might be a target for genocide and that would constitute a burden on the court of specialization . There is also a lack of consensus on what is meant by partial destruction and the magnitude of aggression on a target population that would constitute genocide. International judiciary agencies have produced similar but sometimes contradictory rulings on interpreting those gaps, and that is the reason for the attempt made in this study into tackling the elements that would form the foundation of genocide with special emphasis on the above-mentioned gaps through a comparative study on rulings of international courts.