International Criminal Law

More than 120 states from all over the world are party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The international community all agree that war criminals must not be safe from prosecution anywhere in the world. The Office of the Federal Prosecutor prosecutes crimes under the German International Criminal Code when they are related to Germany. As well as prosecuting perpetrators, this especially also includes safeguarding evidence and interviewing victims.

The first time that the Office of the Federal Prosecutor pressed charges for a crime that violates the German International Criminal Code was in 2011. The defendants were the leader of a Rwandan rebel group and one of his deputies. They were accused of war crimes and being members of a terrorist group. The main defendant was accused of having supported the murder of civilians in four Congolese villages from Germany. Judgement was never handed down, as he died before the end of the case. His deputy was given a long prison sentence.

The Office of the Federal Prosecutor's investigations in connection with the civil war in Syria are particularly extensive, relating both to possible crimes by the Syrian government and to crimes by so-called Islamic State (IS) and other groups.

In February 2016, the Office of the Federal Prosecutor gained access to the Caesar Files, including around 28,000 photos showing corpses with marks of extreme torture. The images were taken by the photographer from the Syrian military police going by the name of “Caesar” and his colleagues at a hospital in Damascus. Analysing the files will help to gather evidence and identify perpetrators.

In 2015 and 2016, the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg took in around 1,000 Yazidi women and children from Syria. The severely traumatised refugees told investigators how they had become victims of crimes by the terror organisation IS. Here, too, they were interviewed by the Office of the Federal Prosecutor in order to secure evidence and identify possible perpetrators.

The Rome Statute reiterates that severe crimes like this cannot go unpunished. The Office of the Federal Prosecutor meets this international obligation by prosecuting crimes under the German International Criminal Code.