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Role of International Criminal Courts in the Formation of Customary International Law

Opinnäytetyöt, Gradut ja muut tutkielmat
Alkuperäinen julkaisupäivä: 7.1.2014

The concept of custom has aroused a considerable amount of disagreement among scholars and publicists. No other source of international law has been subject to such an enthusiastic scholarly debate. The main purpose of this work is to examine the role of international criminal courts and tribunals in today’s customary law-making process. It critically analyzes how international criminal judges have discovered and identified rules of customary international law. The analysis concentrates specifically on the legitimacy of the resulting rules and whether they have managed to provide justice without derogating too much from the principle of legality. In addition, this work clarifies, inter alia, how the modernized view of custom works in the context of ICL. This includes addressing if and how the principle of legality, inherent to criminal law, reconciles with the modern law-making process. The main argument of this work contends that international criminal courts operate in the very heart of the customary law-making process. Their contribution to the corpus of ICL has been indispensable. Consequentially, the significance of the strict recourse to the principle of legality has been down played.

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