The chapter highlights the central role national jurisdictions (should) play in the system of international criminal enforcement and addresses the most common legal issues and practical obstacles which may obstruct the pursuit of accountability at the domestic level. The chapter provides an overview of the relevant state practice from the earlier notable precedents to the most recent instances of prosecution and adjudication of core crimes before domestic courts, in particular under the universal jurisdiction. It clarifies the scope of the duties international law imposes on states, including the obligation to extradite or prosecute. The chapter then zeroes in on every principal issue related to the domestic prosecution and adjudication of international crimes, such the need for adequate implementing legislation as well as the extent to which domestic prosecutions may be hindered by the statutes of limitations, the prohibition on retroactive application of penal provisions, and the principle of ne bis in idem (double jeopardy). The chapter’s final section addresses the political and practical obstacles to tackling impunity for international crimes at the domestic level.

Whether tacked onto a bumper sticker, T-shirt, comic strip, or witty cartoon, humor offers laconic, entertaining, and simple snapshots of the issues and problems that plague societies. The text of the cartoon in the epigraph presents a humorous take on the main topic of the book, distilling a larger conversation on the limits of justice mechanisms and crimes of government officials into a monochromatic depiction of a serene chat between a father and his son. Contemplating the prospects of different career paths, the boy announces his budding interest in organized crime to his dad. Straight-faced and without missing a beat, his father responds, “Government or private sector?,” which draws on a long-standing perception that associates the incriminating behavior of government officials and private sector executives with unchecked impunity. A spin-off of the original cartoon emphasizes the latter, with the father recommending, “I personally would suggest government for you, my son. They never go to jail.”

This chapter examines the first fundamental legal concept of international criminal law, the international crime, and the ideas of persons and of social relations that it expresses. The legal category of international crime determines legally defined socially injurious conduct under international law. The chapter examines the construction of this legal category by tracing the modern criminalisation of conflict-related sexual violence under international law. It then sets out international crimes of sexual violence under customary international law and examines current definitions of sexual violence offences. It analyses how sexual violence as an international crime expresses the concept of the injured person and the ‘injured public interest’ of ‘international society’ in the new legal category of the international crime. The chapter shows that sexual violence offences criminalise injury to the bodily, personal, and sexual integrity of the individual and violation of positive law and universal values of ‘international society’. However, they also reveal a set of unresolved doctrinal and conceptual problems in the legal category. These include the grounds of criminalisation, gender-based or gender-neutral offences, the sexual or violent nature of the crime, and the connection of sexual violence to illegal international violence.

This concluding chapter offers some thoughts on the broader implications of the arguments made in this book. It specifically considers how the book’s contention that a dominant “atrocity aesthetic” influences how international crimes are recognized and conceptualized relates to broader debates concerning the role of international law and international criminal justice, such as those related to questions of determinacy, power, sovereignty, and Global North–South relations. It also considers how aesthetic biases may affect the actual purposes served by international criminal justice as a global project, raising the concerning possibility that one unstated purpose international criminal prosecutions serve is to provide cathartic relief to distant publics exposed to the ugliness of atrocity violence, rather than focusing on the interests and needs of those most directly affected by such violence. It concludes with a call to abandon outdated understandings of atrocities as horrific and spectacular eruptions of violence, and to reconsider what international crimes are in light of the many forms atrocity violence may actually take.

This chapter analyses the development of transnational policing as a crucial element of the federal–transnational security regime of the German Confederation, which the Congress of Vienna had established in 1815 to maintain external and internal security. Narratives of cross-border political subversion and crime triggered new modes of political and transnational policing in nineteenth-century Europe, resulting in both formal police cooperation as well as in various actors and techniques of transnational policing and securitisation. Through the ‘commission-mode’ and the ‘conference-mode’, policing agencies aimed at intelligence, surveillance and suppression, and contributed to the production and dissemination of a systematic knowledge base on political subversion and international crime. In the process, they influenced the development of security narratives and logics and practices of securitisation, and constituted important elements of the emerging European security culture.