International criminal law, on the other hand, is all about the individuals’ responsibility for committing egregious acts that are universally condemned by the community of nations, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Perpetrators of such crimes can be detained, prosecuted and punished in their personal capacity anywhere in the world. Witness the landmark case of Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, who was arrested in London in October of 1998 on charges of committing human rights crimes subject to universal jurisdiction under international law. Or consider the recent conviction in Belgium of four Rwandans, two of them Roman Catholic nuns, for their participation in the mass killings that took place in their country in 1994 -- the first time ever that a national court exercised universal jurisdiction to convict persons for international crimes committed in another country.

Universal jurisdiction, to summarize, refers to the principle that every state has a fundamental interest in bringing to justice the perpetrators of international crimes -- genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes -- no matter where the acts were committed and regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators or their victims. In the Colombian context, as we shall soon see, the warring parties have committed, and continue to carry out, acts amounting to international crimes.

War crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

The current trend in international law is to treat certain prohibited acts as war crimes, regardless of whether they were committed during a civil war like Colombia’s or in the course of an international armed conflict between states. In this context, crimes of war include those acts that violate universally recognized principles of the laws and customs of war applicable to internal armed conflict. Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, which reflects a universally accepted standard for internal armed conflicts, outlaws, among other things, "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture, taking of hostages, [and] outrages upon personal dignity." Moreover, customary norms of international law that supplement common article 3 proscribe intentional attacks against the civilian population as such, or against individual civilians not taking part in the hostilities. Under the modern definition, then, any act committed by one of the warring parties in violation of these basic humanitarian principles is a war crime.

War crimes are different from crimes against humanity because, among other things, they do not require that attacks on the civilian population be widespread or systematic to rise to the level of an international crime. Certain international standards like the prohibition on crimes against humanity or genocide establish very high thresholds that must be met as a legal matter before criminal responsibility attaches; these requirements, however, do not apply to war crimes per se. In the Colombian context, the murder or torture by members of the armed forces of an individual civilian could in itself constitute a war crime. Such an act, however, would not be considered a crime against humanity unless it were part of a much wider and systematic campaign directed against sectors of civil society.