War Crimes and the Laws of War: Analyzing the Legal Framework for Prosecuting Human Rights Violations

Abstract

Armed conflicts continue to generate grave violations despite an extensive body of international humanitarian, criminal, and human rights law. This review examines the legal framework governing the identification, investigation, and prosecution of war crimes, with attention to the distinction between international and non-international armed conflicts, the elements of war crimes, and the relationship between humanitarian law and human rights law. It analyses the Hague and Geneva regimes, the Additional Protocols, customary international humanitarian law, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The review also considers major categories of war crimes, modes of individual liability, command responsibility, defences, domestic jurisdiction, universal jurisdiction, complementarity, immunities, hybrid tribunals, and United Nations accountability mechanisms. Particular attention is given to investigative barriers, witness protection, digital and forensic evidence, fair-trial guarantees, and the judicial contributions of Tadić, Kunarac, Akayesu, Lubanga, Al Mahdi, and Ntaganda. The analysis finds that the principal weakness of the current system lies less in the absence of legal rules than in selective enforcement, political interference, weak state cooperation, jurisdictional gaps, and failure to execute arrest warrants. It evaluates autonomous weapons, cyber operations, and environmental harm. Stronger domestic implementation, international cooperation, evidence preservation, victim participation, reparations, and clearer regulation of emerging technologies are essential to credible and impartial accountability.