María Libia Arenal Lora
This paper aims to highlight some of the most important challenges that international law will face in the coming decades, namely the possible international criminalization of serious economic abuses -the so called “economic crimes against humanity”- characterised by the violation of basic human values that are recognised and protected by the international community. This article will focus on analysing, on the one hand, the importance of the category of crimes against humanity, as a teleological and normative framework, for a legal development for “economic crimes against humanity” in international law; on the other hand, it will present the difficulties for the inclusion of these serious economic abuses in the regulation of crimes against humanity in Article 7 of the RS Rome Statute, based on the analysis of the common elements of the context in which the conducts must take place – threshold clause or chapeau clause-. It will end with some contributions for the construction of a contextual element for “economic crimes against humanity”, on the grounds of the definition of crimes against humanity in the Rome Statute, to become crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.