War Crimes Should Not Be Held Accountaable At An Individual Capacity

This essay will discuss how perpetrators of war crimes should not be held accountable at an individual capacity and instead at a collective capacity. Through the literature and research of various authors, I will navigate through the weaknesses of individual accountability, by discussing that prosecuting individuals may be appealing in terms of creating “a clear division” between those who are “guilty, innocent, perpetrators and victims” (Rigby, 2001: 5). However, this results in four types of guilt identifies by Jaspers: namely, criminal guilt, metaphysical guilt, moral guilt and political guilt. Which will illustrate that every actor in involved in the war crime is guilty except for victims and that punishing perpetrators at an individual scale aims to punish them through the use of trials and purges, while collective accountability encourages reconciliation and relation to the victims. …show more content…
For example, Bell uses the example of soldiers of where he suggests that “soldiers must be held accountable for their own failures” but one ought to consider “what about the organizational structures that facilitate such mistakes in the first place?” (Bell, 2011: 44). This is because with the case of soldiers, when they are simulating scenarios of combating during the training process, they are not taught ethics and morals. Therefore, interactions with those they are in conflict with is of a “robotic” nature in practice, whereas, in reality that is not the case and lack the capacity to manage those encounters (Bell, 2011: