Conference: Criminal Jurisdiction 100 Years after the 1907 Hague Peace Conference

The 2007 Hague Joint Conference on Contemporary Issues of International Law will take place in The Hague, June 28-30, 2007. The theme is Criminal Jurisdiction 100 Years after the 1907 Hague Peace Conference. The program is here. Why attend?

In 1907, forty-six of the world’s leading nations assembled at The Hague to adopt a dozen seminal conventions, declarations and regulations defining the rules of conduct in modern warfare. These rules have since ripened into customary international law, binding on all states. They formed the basis for the later adoption of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols, as well as the Biological Weapons and Chemical Weapons Conventions.

The “Martens Clause” of the 1907 Hague Convention IV served as a foundation for the concept of crimes against humanity, recognized in the Nuremberg and Tokyo judgments, the Genocide Convention, and the Statutes of the contemporary international criminal tribunals. The Hague Conference of 1907 also served as a model for the League of Nations and United Nations, and it considered for the first time a proposal to establish a World Court, leading ultimately to the creation of the International Court of Justice.

The 8th Hague Joint Conference honors the centennial anniversary of the Hague Conference of 1907 with a line up of panels focusing on salient issues in international humanitarian law and criminal jurisdiction.