ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades international understandings of war crimes or crimes against humanity have consolidated around the notion that such events affect all humankind and therefore demand an international response – as the preamble to the International Criminal Court notes, ‘such grave crimes threaten the peace, security and well-being of the world’ (Cryer 2005, 277). The development of political, ideological and legal structures of human rights now mean that ‘doing nothing’ about repression is no longer an option for either international or domestic actors (Lutz 2006).
