INTRODUCTION

In 1758, Emmerich de Vattel wrote of ‘the great guilt of the sovereign’ who undertakes ‘an unjust war’:

In 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court echoed Vattel's condemnation by listing the crime of aggression, as one of the four core crimes under the Court's jurisdiction. Yet the exercise of jurisdiction remained suspended in the absence of agreement about the definition and about the jurisdictional conditions for the crime. Looking back over the decade that followed, the world is left to wonder how it might look different today if the crime had been fully included in the Rome Statute from the beginning and despair about the crime's brutality had been etched already then with a stronger acid into international criminal law.

KAMPALA

ADOPTION OF THE AMENDMENTS ON THE CRIME OF AGGRESSION

Finally in 2010, the long-missing international accord on the definition and the jurisdictional conditions was achieved in Kampala, Uganda, when the Review Conference of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted its historical resolution on the crime of aggression. A new seed for world peace was planted in Africa. Deciding by consensus and aiming at the full integration of provisions on the crime of aggression into the legal framework of the International Criminal Court, the Review Conference adopted amendments to the Rome Statute, amendments to the Elements of Crimes, and a series of Understandings.