Beyond Individual Accountability: The Meaning of State Responsibility

The essence of human rights is to protect individuals, and two different approaches have evolved to accomplish this. The first involves holding individuals criminally accountable for directing and/or carrying out violations of international humanitarian law and human rights standards. Certainly, the Nuremberg and Tokyo proceedings against a select group of political, military, and economic leaders from Germany and Japan remain the high-water mark of establishing individual accountability, yet in the past decade or so the animating spirit of these trials has been revived. One of the most noteworthy achievements in this realm was the worldwide effort to extradite the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain so that he could face charges for international crimes committed under his rule. Beyond this, the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) have both made significant contributions in terms of prosecuting and punishing war criminals, as have the special UN tribunals in East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia. But certainly the most noteworthy institutional achievement has been the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC). What explains this attention to individual accountability? Perhaps the best answer was provided by the Nuremberg court (1946) itself and repeated frequently since then: ‘Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.’