Journal Name: Harvard National Security Journal

Volume Number: 11

Issue Number: 1

Abstract:

This Article explores the intersection of International Criminal Law (“ICL”) and domestic legal systems in the counterterrorism arena, with a particular focus on the United Nations Security Council’s (“UNSC”) promulgation of relevant legal obligations. This account critically examines the ways in which ICL, and international law more broadly, can address terrorism, and then investigates the viability of expanding the International Criminal Court’s (“ICC”) jurisdiction to encompass crimes of terrorism. In analyzing ground-breaking UNSC resolutions imposing wide-ranging counterterrorism duties on states, I shed light on that organ’s “quasi-legislative” exercise of its powers and the implications for the implementation of those obligations in domestic law. Ultimately, I argue that the global counterterrorism campaign can only be pursued meaningfully through what I term a “transnational network of criminal and civil law.” This system is based on giving states the power to write and enforce their own counterterrorism laws under a UNSC mandate.