War Crimes Law (Belgium)

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)

    “... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
    to escape writing of the worst thing of all—
    not the crimes of other, not even our own death,
    but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
    so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
    mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    “My hope is ... that we may recover ... something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have started out with in the old days of the oracles, who communed with the intimations of divinity.”
    —Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)