Crime of Aggression

The crime of aggression is the international offense of planning, preparing, initiating or executing an act of armed force by one state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another state, committed by a person in a position to effectively control or direct that state's political or military action, making it, unlike most offenses in this atlas, an offense that can only be committed by a state's own leadership rather than by an ordinary individual acting alone. It is recognized alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity as one of the four core crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, though its own definition and the conditions under which the court may exercise jurisdiction over it were negotiated and activated later than the other three, reflecting the particular difficulty states have had agreeing on where legitimate use of force ends and criminal aggression begins. The offense is distinguished from war crimes, which concern how a conflict is conducted once it has begun, by instead addressing the legality of resorting to armed force in the first place, an issue closely tied to, and largely defined by reference to, the United Nations Charter's own restrictions on the use of force between states. Because the crime of aggression targets state leadership rather than individual combatants, its prosecution raises distinctive questions of head-of-state immunity and international jurisdiction not present in the same way for the other core international crimes.