Abstract
This essay begins by exposing gaps in accountability in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It explains why neither the International Criminal Court nor any other body is authorized to pursue all the crimes of that war, and then considers whether a more comprehensive approach might be found in the United Nations War Crimes Commission. In its five years of operation (1943–1948) that multilateral institution gathered information on tens of thousands of potential suspects, and helped to coordinate trials against many of them – not only the Nuremberg proceedings, but also in Allied zones of occupation and in national courts.
Repository Citation
Diane Marie Amann,
Time for a New War Crimes Commission?
, Vol. 2 Ukraine Symposium: International Law in the Crucible of Conflict 343
(2025),
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/1845
in Ukraine Symposium: International Law in the Crucible of Conflict, Vol. 2 (Sean Watts, Ronald Alcala & Mehmet Çoban eds., West Point Press, 2025), pp. 343–47.
This essay was first published as an Articles of War blog post (https://lieber.westpoint.edu/time-for-new-war-crimes-commission/).
Previously posted on SSRN.