State Responsibility v. Individual Responsibility for International Crimes: Tertium Non Datur? Marina Spinedi Full text available: PDF format * Abstract The ICJ held in the recent Congo v. Belgium case that a former Minister for Foreign Affairs of a state may be subjected to the criminal jurisdiction of another state only in respect of acts carried out `in a private capacity'. Therefore the question arises of whether international crimes committed by persons with the status of state officials are to be regarded as acts done `in a private capacity'. This article argues that the answer to this question should be in the negative. Treating war crimes or crimes against humanity perpetrated by a state official as acts committed `in a private capacity' would mean that such acts could not be attributed to the state at an international level. As a consequence, other states would not be able to invoke the responsibility of the offending state for those acts. * The free viewer (Acrobat Reader) for PDF file is available at the Adobe Systems.
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