ICC makes waging war a crime

Following the devastation of the second world war, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg, established by the Allied Forces to try leading figures of defeated Nazi Germany, described aggressive wars waged against other nations as "[a] supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". Some 60 years later, history was made in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 12, 2010 in Kampala, Uganda, the site of the Review Conference of the International Criminal Court (ICC). For the first time in the war stricken story of mankind, waging aggressive wars has become a prosecutable crime in international law and given precise meaning and teeth before the ICC - this on the strength of an unexpected consensus reached between member states of the Court (or in ICC terminology 'states parties').