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Accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.
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In the past fifteen years, the world community has faced a number of conflicts replete with violations of the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. In response to two of these conflicts, the United Nations, acting through the Security Council, established two ad-hoc criminal tribunals to prosecute war crimes. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ("ICTY") and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ("ICTR"), established in 1993 and 1994, respectively, were the first international tribunals since Nuremberg and Tokyo to criminally prosecute individuals for war crimes.
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The ICTY and ICTR, established in 1993 and 1994, were the first international tribunals since Nuremberg and Tokyo to criminally prosecute individuals for war crimes.
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The ICTY's and ICTR's jurisprudence has greatly influenced the ongoing development and evolution of the law of war. One key example is the categorization, by both the ICTR and ICTY, of rape as a grave breach. Rape of civilians, especially systematic rape of women in a community by armed forces, was not explicitly recognized as a grave breach under the Geneva Conventions; both Tribunals, however, recognized it as such. Having found individuals guilty of such acts, the Tribunals have classified rape, when perpetrated within these armed conflicts, as a war crime. Furthermore, the mixed internal and international nature of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda forced the Tribunals, in particular the ICTY, to articulate the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to modern conflicts where both internal and external armed forces participated in the conflict.
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