ABSTRACT
Essentially, “war crimes are violations of the laws and customs of war entailing individual criminal responsibility directly under international law”. War crimes are committed during warfare, but there is also a sense in which it is a generic word for the violation of the principles of humanity—be it in war or outside the context of wars. Although immigration and perjury issues were involved in the trial of Mohammed Jabbateh, the United States court’s assumption of jurisdiction on the roles he played in the civil war in his native country—Liberia—underline the universality jurisdiction principle that attaches to war crimes as one of the radical evils. This is what gives a war criminal the unenviable reputation of an enemy of mankind; for wherever he or she may be, the violation of our shared principle of humanity is a bold stigma of an intolerable deviant behaviour that must be punished by whoever takes him or her into custody.
