Superior Responsibility Doctrine in the Light of the ICC Approach: Causal Link Requirement

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is the first legal instrument in the history of the International Criminal law that requires the causal link in case of the command responsibility. The customary law established by previous judicial bodies namely the International Military Tribunal (IMT), the International Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and International Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was mostly covering general conditions of the criminal responsibility such as the commander-subordinate relationship, the lack of the effective control and the superior`s failure to prevent or punish his or her subordinates’ atrocities. Hence to the newly required criterion of a causal link that was introduced by the Article 28 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (the Rome Statute) this thesis is dedicated to investigating two practical issues which could be raised from the following theoretical questions. The first one is the threshold of the causal link as it is required by in this concept since it arises from the theory of crime of omission and could not possibly be of the direct standard. The second is the possibility to establish the causal link between the criminal conduct of subordinates and their commander`s failure to punish this crime in terms of the application of retroactive causality, as it had raised the large debate on the limitation of the liability only for the failure to punish which causes the future offences. Following the analysis of the leading judgements of the mentioned tribunals and the works of the most prominent scholars in the field, this thesis is about to clarify those aforesaid questions.