In July 2008, the Italian Court of Cassation held that Italian courts lacked jurisdiction over the 2005 killing in Baghdad by a US serviceman of an Italian intelligence officer in civilian clothes and the wounding of another officer and a reporter. The Court asserted that the action was...

The author discusses a decision handed down in 2007 by an Italian military court concerning the firing by Italian troops on an Iraqi ambulance in 2004, at Nassiriyah, resulting in the killing of four civilians. The court held that the action was covered by the defence of putative special...

In its recent Genocide judgment, the International Court of Justice discussed the question of whether the acts of genocide carried out at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb armed forces must be attributed to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), as claimed by Bosnia. It applied the effective control...

The recent judgment by the Israeli Supreme Court on targeted killings is a landmark decision in many respects. Its main merit lies in trying to give precision to, and therefore make concretely applicable by the belligerents, some loose standards of international humanitarian law on the conduct...

On the face of it the 1948 Convention on Genocide appears to be a treaty that on the one hand obliges contracting states to criminalize and punish genocide in their domestic legal systems and, on the other, arranges for interstate judicial cooperation for the repression of genocide. The...