The Necessity of Criminalization of International Crimes and its Models

In the early decades of the 21th century, one of the important issue of international criminal justice is importing the international crimes into national justice system in order to make possible the national prosecution of international crimes. In fact, by experiencing unimaginable atrocity during the past century, protecting the peace, security and well-being of the world is a very valuable humanitarian goal. To achieve this goal, different measures have been taken like establishing ad hoc or permanent courts to put an end to impunity, to prosecute the international crimes and to punish the perpetrators of these crimes, but regarding the sovereignty right, the case is always that priority is given to each country to prosecute the international crime. Therefore, in the first level, countries themselves should prosecute these crimes. In this way, criminalizing international crimes in the internal criminal law is a necessary instrument for prosecuting such crimes in the national criminal law. Sometimes, this necessity is driven from a treaty or even international customary law, but it seems that the international criminal justice is the most important basis upon which importing the international crimes into national criminal law is justified. There are different models among which ratifying autonomous national criminal law provision is preferable, due to the fact that application of this model provides the clear definition of crimes and their punishments.