The Pre-Trial Chamber’s Significant Decision on Joint Criminal Enterprise for Individual Responsibility

by David Scheffer and Anthony Dinh
— 3 Jun, 2010

International criminal law represents the challenge of assigning individual responsibility for acts of massive violence which no single person can directly perpetrate in their entirety. In the words of one commentator, the idea of applying legal rules “to the complex and chaotic backdrop of contemporary armed conflicts and episodes of mass atrocity is a bold—some would say futile—effort to fix individual responsibility for history‟s violent march.”

The doctrine of joint criminal enterprise (JCE) is an example of this effort to establish individual responsibility for complex atrocity crimes (namely, genocide, crimes against humanity, and serious war crimes). Under this doctrine, a person is individually liable for crimes committed through a common criminal plan. JCE obviates the need to show that the person physically perpetrated the crime in order to hold him/her responsible for the crime. It allows for the assignment of liability to individuals who contribute to the execution of a criminal plan but who do not physically perpetrate the possibly millions of killings, torture, and rapes. JCE therefore provides a means of assigning responsibility to senior leaders who do not pull the trigger but who may bear the greatest culpability for international crimes…

Cambodia Tribunal Monitor’s Trial Observer posts are written according to the personal observations and opinions of the writer and do not constitute a transcript of ECCC proceedings or the views of Cambodia Tribunal Monitor and/or its partners. Official court transcripts for the ECCC’s hearings may be accessed at the ECCC website.