International standards and responsibility competition according to the International Criminal Court: Anatomy, interpretation, proposals

Abstract

International criminal law constitutes, by its intrinsic characteristics, the place of the multiple and the plurality, in which the contest of norms and crimes finds its most natural and logical manifestation. The present paper deals with the apparent competition of norms in international criminal law and, in particular, the hypotheses of normative convergences established between the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Statute of Rome and applied of International Criminal Court. The analysis distinguishes the cases of intra-categorical competition, which include the convergences that occur within the same category of crime, and the hypotheses of inter-categorical competition, concerning the convergences that occur between the different categories of crimes. In the background, the awareness that any path taken towards rationalization and simplification of the competition of standards must come to terms with the impossibility of eliminating or destroying the phenomenon of convergence a priori, as it is inevitable.