ABSTRACT
For the most part, the responsibility for international law violations has rested on states, and such responsibility has been primarily civil in the form o f reparations. Although the notion that states could be criminally liable was put forward by the ILC in their 1980 Draft Articles on State Responsibility, it was not warmly received and was removed from the draft.1 The ILC suggested that crimes o f aggression, colonial domination, slavery, genocide and apartheid could give rise to the criminal responsibility of states. However, the effectiveness o f international criminal law as a penal system o f laws could be called into question when its target ceases to be the individual. International criminal law is best as a deterrent if the individual is its objective.2 However, it is only recently in the history o f inter-state relations that the individual has become a target o f international law.
