The trial of Jean-Pierre Bemba will be critical for the future of the international law doctrine of “command responsibility” – the basis for holding political and military leaders guilty for the atrocities committed by their troops with their acquiescence (often by nods and winks), but without their direct approval.
Troops loyal to Mr Bemba certainly crossed over to the Central African Republic in 2002 and committed mass murder and mass rape. One legal issue for the court will be whether he can be held …

Genocide is understood by most to be the gravest crime against humanity it is possible to commit.
It is the mass extermination of a whole group of people, an attempt to destroy an entire group and wipe them out of existence.
But at the heart of this simple idea is a complicated tangle of legal definitions.
This has led to conflicting views on when a mass killing, or forced movement, of people can be called genocide.
There are people who say that there was only one genocide during the last century.
Others say there were …

AT LAST, it’s out. Or rather, as is the way with these things, large chunks of it have been leaked to the press. The report by the United Nations high commissioner for human rights into war crimes and human-rights abuses during Congo’s wars from 1996 to 2003 has been long in the making, and is also long in the reading—about 600 pages, apparently. The collapse of the country then known as Zaire in the mid-1990s precipitated Africa’s first continental war, involving eight countries, and caused the …