On June 26,2002 the German Federal Parliament passed an Act to Introduce the Code of Crimes Against International Law (“the Act”), which subsequently entered into force on June 30,2002, the day after its promulgation in the German Federal Law Gazette. Article 1 of the Act contains the Code of Crimes Against International Law (“CCAIL”), which provides the legal framework for German courts to prosecute crimes for which the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) is competent, namely, genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes (“the core crimes”). The remaining Articles of the Act contain, inter alia, amendments to the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, the primary purpose of which is to harmonize the general criminal law with the CCAIL.

For a better understanding of the significance of the CCAIL on the national and international plane, it is important to recall briefly the legal situation in Germany regarding the prosecution of the core crimes prior to the entry into force of the Act

Introduction

Trial Chamber I of the International Tribunal (the “ Trial Chamber”) is seized of a case which concerns events surrounding the military encirclement of the city of Sarajevo in 1992 by Bosnian Serb forces.

The Prosecution alleges that “The siege of Sarajevo, as it came to be popularly known, was an episode of such notoriety in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia that one must go back to World War II to find a parallel in European history. Not since then had a professional army conducted a campaign of unrelenting violence against the inhabitants of a European city so as to reduce them to a state of medieval deprivation in which they were in constant fear of death. In the period covered in this Indictment, there was nowhere safe for a Sarajevan, not at home, at school, in a hospital, from deliberate attack.”

On December 14, 2017, the International Criminal Court's (ICC) Assembly of States Parties (ASP or Assembly) adopted a resolution activating the ICC's jurisdiction over the crime of aggression as of July 17, 2018. As a result, the leaders of states now face the possibility of being held individually criminally responsible for unlawful acts of inter-state armed force. The resolution has thus rightly been hailed as historic—notwithstanding the significant limitation on the Court's jurisdiction accepted as the price of activation.

Opinion 2/13 of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) declared the draft agreement on European Union accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) incompatible with the Treaty on European Union. The Opinion comes toward the end of a long and gradual process of incorporating human and fundamental rights principles into the legal system of the European Community and its successor, the European Union. Opinion 2/13 sends the Commission back to the drawing board on what has long been seen as the capstone of that process—EU accession to the Strasbourg human rights regime as an external check on human rights protection within the European Union.

On June 27, 2017, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (GC) delivered its judgment in Satakunnan Markkinapörssi Oy and Satamedia Oy v. Finland. It was the first time that the GC considered whether the application of data protection law to the publishing activities of a media outlet had violated the right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights (Convention). In its judgment, the GC found that a prohibition on two companies publishing the taxation data of 1.2 million identifiable individuals had not violated the right to freedom of expression.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki signed a historic agreement on July 9, 2018, in Asmara, Eritrea, ending over two decades of open hostilities and war. The Joint Declaration of Peace and Friendship (Joint Declaration) marks a fundamental change for the Horn of Africa, with the reconciliation possibly altering the economic and political dynamics of the region. The Joint Declaration resulted from several key developments occurring over a few weeks from June through early July 2018. Ethiopia announced its acceptance of the original Algiers Agreement, dated December 12, 2000, which had never been implemented, and its willingness to abide by the 2002 international Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) ruling that awarded disputed territory to Eritrea, including the border town of Badme. Previously, Ethiopia had rejected the ruling and asked for a new ruling. Ethiopia had also previously insisted that relations must be restored before any territorial resolution. President Afwerki agreed to negotiate, after stating for years that Ethiopia had to withdraw its troops from the disputed town of Badme first. A few weeks before the signing of the Joint Declaration, the Eritrean foreign minister visited Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, marking the first bilateral meeting between the two since the war began.