International Crimes Punished by Court

Genocide means any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. While attempts to destroy groups have been very much a part of human history, it has been either a description of the action or a very general concept, such as massacres or mass murder. It wasn’t until 1944 when Raphael Lemkin wrote, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, which was the first public articulation of the concept of genocide. Today people still have a hard time classifying what is genocide and what is not. For example, the continuing debate about the Armenian genocide. This is why the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 1998. Now, genocide is an international crime for which individuals, no matter how high in authority, may be indicted, tried, and punished by the ICC.
This way nations can not hide behind that fact that a war is going on at the time to justify genocidal acts. This Court is also good because a nations laws or customs may excuse them in part for there actions. With the ICC no one can escape the brutality of there actions.