GLOSSARY
The Rome Statute: the four crimes it defines, and the two puzzles it leaves open
Updated July 23, 2026
When this site cites "Article 8 of the Rome Statute" regarding a war crime, it refers to the text of the treaty that in 1998 defined, for the first time on a permanent basis, what counts as a crime in international criminal law. It is a different text from the International Criminal Court that it created: here the subject is not the institution, but what the Statute puts in writing as a crime — and two points it deliberately leaves unresolved.
What it is
Adopted in Rome on 17 July 1998 by a vote of 120 in favour, 7 against and 21 abstentions (the United States among those against), it entered into force on 1 July 2002, after the sixtieth ratification. A Preamble and 13 Parts define the prosecutable crimes, the rules of jurisdiction, the structure of the Court, and the cooperation required of states.
The four crimes (Article 5)
The Statute defines four categories: genocide (Art. 6), crimes against humanity (Art. 7), war crimes (Art. 8), aggression (Art. 8bis). Article 8 — by far the most cited on this site — lists dozens of specific prohibited conducts in armed conflict: from deliberate attacks on civilians to the forced transfer of population, from the use of banned weapons to outrages upon the dignity of the bodies of the enemy dead. On this site it has been invoked for the use of white phosphorus in Gaza and Lebanon, for the killing of a woman in her own home in Mansouri under an evacuation order, and for the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline charged as a war crime by a German court.
The crime of aggression: the narrowest jurisdiction
Aggression is the only one of the four crimes with a separate regime. Defined only in 2010 at the Kampala Review Conference, the Court's jurisdiction over it was activated only on 17 July 2018 — twenty years after the Statute's adoption. And even once activated, it remains narrow: the Court can only investigate an aggression if both the aggressor state and the victim state have accepted that jurisdiction, barring a Security Council referral. This is why Russia cannot be prosecuted at the ICC for the aggression against Ukraine: it never accepted that specific jurisdiction, and a referral by the Security Council is blocked by its own veto as a permanent member.
The first puzzle: immunity
Article 27 of the Statute declares the irrelevance of official capacity: a sitting head of state enjoys no immunity before the Court, neither as grounds for excluding responsibility nor as a mitigating factor. But Article 98 forbids the Court from requesting the surrender of a person if this would require the requested state to act inconsistently with its obligations to a third state regarding diplomatic immunity — unless that third state waives immunity. The result is an ambiguity that states exploit when convenient: it is precisely the argument used by the US ambassador to the UN to call New York City's mayor's initiative against Netanyahu "pure political theatre," invoking together head-of-state immunity and the protections of the UN Headquarters Agreement for visiting foreign officials — a case already covered on this site.
The second puzzle: withdrawal
Article 127 allows a state party to withdraw with one year's notice. Burundi did so first, in 2017; the Philippines in 2019. A detail often misunderstood: withdrawal does not erase the Court's jurisdiction over acts that occurred while the state was still a party — it applies only going forward.
Who actually applies the Statute, how the Court born from it works, and why an arrest warrant is often not enough.
Read the explainer on the ICCCases already cited on this site
The use of white phosphorus in Gaza and Lebanon, the killing of a civilian woman in her own home in Mansouri in Lebanon, and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline charged by a German court as a war crime have all been read through Article 8 of the Statute — together, in many cases, with the Fourth Geneva Convention that same article codifies as a crime.
Sources: Rome Statute, full text — ICC · Resolution ICC-ASP/16/Res.5 — activation of jurisdiction over aggression · Coalition for the ICC — the Kampala amendments