State socialist endeavours for the non-applicability of statutory limitations to international crimes : historical roots and current implications

Abstract

This article analyses the role of Eastern European socialist governments and legal ex- perts in encoding the non-applicability of statutory limitations to international crimes. It argues that socialist elites put this topic on the agenda of the international commu- nity in the 1960s through two interrelated processes. On the one hand, legal scholars cooperated with Western European lawyers in order to enforce the idea that the in- ternational crimes codified by the Nuremberg Charter should not be subject to pre- scription. On the other hand, Eastern European governments proposed and enabled – through their cooperation with African and Asian states – the adoption of the 1968 UN Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this instru- ment became an important tool for advancing prosecutions of international crimes committed under dictatorships and violent conflicts, particularly in Central Eastern Europe and Latin America.