The Kampala Compromise on the Crime of Aggression

Abstract

The word ‘historic’ suffers from exaggerated use, but the adoption of the package proposal on the crime of aggression by the First Review Conference on the Rome Statute, on 11 June 2010 in Kampala, deserves that label. This development concludes decades of preparatory work and completes the Rome Statute. The authors describe and analyse the major steps leading to the Kampala compromise from an insider’s perspective, and characterize the consensus decision as a breakthrough that, if nurtured, may eventually bring to fruition the famous Nuremberg promise given by Robert Jackson.