War Crimes Law (Belgium)
Belgium's War Crimes Law invokes the concept of universal jurisdiction to allow anyone to bring war crime charges in Belgian courts, regardless of where the alleged crimes have taken place.
Note that this is a Belgian law and is different from the International Criminal Court, which is a treaty body to try war crimes, and also different from the International Court of Justice, which is a U.N. body to settle disputes between countries. Both of these bodies reside in nearby The Hague, Netherlands, although some have said that American Servicemen's Protection Act passed by the US was also directed against the War Crimes Law.
Read more about War Crimes Law (Belgium): Background, Universal Jurisdiction, Problems With Implementation of The Law, Most Cases Dropped, Modified Law and Criticism, Court of Arbitration
Famous quotes containing the words war, crimes and/or law:
“High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Show’rs on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence; and, from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain war with Heav’n, and by success untaught,
His proud imaginations”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Here, lads, we live by the law of the taiga. But even here people manage to live. D’you know who are the ones the camps finish off? Those who lick other men’s left-overs, those who set store by the doctors, and those who peach on their mates.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)