CYIL 2015

INTRODUCTION TO THE SECTION “SYMPOSIUM ON THE CRIME OF AGGRESSION” INTRODUCTION TO THE SECTION “SYMPOSIUM ON THE CRIME OF AGGRESSION” On April 24, 2015 a conference called The Crime of Aggression within the Rome Statute post-Kampala was organized under the auspices of the Charles University Faculty of Law’s Research Centre for Human Rights (hereinafter referred to as “UNCE”). UNCE is an interdisciplinary research centre of the Faculty of Law focused on topics in broad terms related to protection of human rights both under international and domestic law, and, as such, it also covers some issues of international criminal law. Since the Czech Republic has recently ratified the Kampala amendments to the Rome Statute, the occasion to organize a conference to discuss the legal issues of one of these two amendments (Resolution RC/Res. 6, on the crime of aggression) presented itself. The conference took place within the representative premises of the Charles University Faculty of Law and hosted 10 speakers, of whom each presented a very interesting topic. The group of speakers included legal academics from Charles University in Prague, students of the PhD. programme in international law, a professional from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, as well as other academics and legal professionals interested in international criminal law. Due to the different nationalities of the speakers, the contributions were presented both in Czech and English and the following discussions were also bi-lingual. The organizers of UNCE wish to thank all the speakers for their contributions and the interesting discussion that followed them and showed that the definition of aggression contains many problematic aspects that are not going to be easy to solve. Since there are not many publications written on this topic, the Editors of the Czech Yearbook of Public & Private International Law (a law journal of the Czech Society of International Law) proposed to publish all the submitted contributions in volume 6 of this journal. This whole section of the Yearbook entails the contributions that were presented at the above mentioned conference and submitted to CYIL and were accepted, after a peer review procedure, for publication.

Prof. Dr. Pavel Šturma Mgr. Milan Lipovský

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