On Tuesday, Just Security experts spoke at a side-event during the 21st Session of the Assembly of State Parties at the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the case for creating an international tribunal to prosecute the crime of aggression against Ukraine. Based on our six-part series, Just Security Executive Editor and Yale Professor Oona Hathaway and New York University Professor Jennifer Trahan made the case for reforming the jurisdiction of the ICC to better address the crime of aggression and other options to directly address the crime of aggression committed against Ukraine.
The Just Security series develops concrete proposals for how the Government of Ukraine and the United Nations could work together to create a tribunal. Hathaway began the series by exploring the case for creating an international tribunal and specifically for doing so through an agreement with the United Nations, acting on the recommendation of the General Assembly. In the next three articles, Astrid Reisinger Coracini, Trahan, and former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues David J. Scheffer discussed the features of a potential tribunal. Finally, Clauss Kress, special advisor to the ICC prosecutor on the crime of aggression, writing in his personal capacity, will conclude the series with a capstone essay. Together, these articles offer a template that could form the foundation for a new international tribunal.
The series is based on a meeting held in the summer of 2022 at the Yale Club in New York City that aimed to generate a detailed proposal for a tribunal to try the crime of aggression in Ukraine. The Chair’s summary provides an overview of the meeting – which was hosted by the Permanent Mission of Liechtenstein to the U.N. and the Permanent Mission of Latvia to the U.N. and attended by representatives of the Government of Ukraine as well as a number of other U.N. Member States, academics, and members of civil society.