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State Sovereignty and International Criminal Law, edited by Morten Bergsmo and Ling Yan, brings together two recent issues of international law: the rise of international criminal law as a building block in the nascent constitution of the international legal order and the increasingly active participation of China in international law. Even though China is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), it has until recently been de facto absent from the debates over norms of international law. Likewise, international criminal justice is a field of law that stagnated for more than 40 years. The last two decades have witnessed a revival of both phoenixes.
This anthology, prepared in the context of the Li Haopei Lecture Series of the Forum for International Criminal Law, offers the view of Chinese and European international lawyers, scholars and judges on three issues: immunity of state officials from foreign prosecution for international crimes; universal jurisdiction and the newly adopted amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute) on the crime of aggression. These three issues are highly topical.
In the third and perhaps pivotal chapter, Zhou Lulu, director of the Treaty Division of the Department of Treaty and Law, Ministry Foreign Affairs of China, gives a brief analysis of a few controversial issues in contemporary international criminal law. All of the controversial issues addressed in this article, including aggression, universal jurisdiction and immunity, are discussed by the other contributors to the book - some agreeing and some disagreeing with Zhou.
Zhou initiates the debate by making assertive and controversial points on controversial issues. She begins provocatively with the crime of aggression, as defined in the amendment to the Rome Statute adopted at the 2010 Review Conference of the Rome Statute in Kampala, Uganda. The preconditions for the
