A CRITICAL STUDY ON INDIVIDUAL CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE CRIME OF AGGRESSION: FROM THE NUREMBERG TRIALS TO THE KAMPALA AMENDMENTS

AUTHOR – SIDDARTH NANDAN HEGDE, STUDENT AT CHRIST (DEEMED TO BE) UNIVERSITY, LAVASA, PUNE

BEST CITATION – SIDDARTH NANDAN HEGDE, A CRITICAL STUDY ON INDIVIDUAL CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE CRIME OF AGGRESSION: FROM THE NUREMBERG TRIALS TO THE KAMPALA AMENDMENTS, INDIAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL REVIEW (IJLR), 6 (8) OF 2026, PG. 697-703, APIS – 3920 – 0001 & ISSN – 2583-2344. DOI – https://doi.org/10.65393/IJLRV6I874

ABSTRACT

The article is concerned with the question of whether the revolutionary legal concept of individual criminal responsibility for the crime of aggression, developed at Nuremberg and Tokyo in 1945-1946, has been an effective universal norm or a device for upholding the status quo, and protecting the powerful against the prosecution of the powerless. The article builds on the pre-1945 legal framework, the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, the post-war legal jurisprudence (Nicaragua, Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza), and the Kampala Amendments to the Rome Statute from 2010, and concludes that the enforcement of the prohibition on aggression has always been based on geopolitical power and not legal principle. The national exemption of Article 15bis(5) and the veto of the P5 on Security Council referrals are structurally similar to what Justice Radhabinod Pal had observed in his dissent in Tokyo in 1948. No prosecution has started in the seven years since the Kampala Amendments have come into force. The article ends with a plea for “structural candor,” that is, recognition that international criminal law is a law that can be imposed on the weak but not much on the middle powers, and applied selectively to great powers, without losing its moral imperative and without being complete in a political sense.

Keywords: Crime of Aggression, Nuremberg, Kampala Amendments, Pacta Sunt Servanda, ICC Article 8bis, P5 Veto, Justice Pal, Selective Justice, Nullem Crimen Sine Lege.