Widening the Crime, Narrowing the Machinery: What the June 2026 Amendment Record Shows About the Crimes Against Humanity Convention

[Rashmi Raman is a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Law, National University of Singapore.]

In January this year, on this blog, Christine Ryan, Richard Dicker and Akshaya Kumar urged supportive States to resist what they called premature minimalism, warning that limiting proposals to what nearly all member States might accept “risks pointless concessions and irreparably weakening the text”. The argument then was about how much to ask for. We now know what governments asked for, and the record answers a question nobody was asking.

Resolution 79/122 invited proposals for amendments to the International Law Commission’s 2019 Draft Articles, to be filed with the Secretary-General by 30 April 2026 and compiled into the single text that goes before the second Preparatory Committee session from 12 to 15 April 2027. Sixty-two States and entities filed sixty-four documents, and the Secretariat published them in June.

Governments were generous with the definition and nearly silent about enforcement. Almost every amendment to draft article 2 adds a new prohibited act; two governments in the whole corpus drafted an institution. My argument is that these are one fact rather than two. This convention has no court attached to it, so every act added to draft article 2 enlarges what a State’s own prosecutors and courts may do, while a monitoring body is the only thing anyone proposed that would put a State in front of somebody else. The ambition of the definition is cheap, and it is cheap for the reason the machinery is dear.

That reading is only available from the corpus as a whole. Kate Schuetze and Jan Wetzel worked through it here last week for draft article 7, tracing what Asia-Pacific States said about the bases of national jurisdiction, which is the ordinary way to use a negotiating record and the right way to handle a provision whose disagreements were already well known. It cannot show an asymmetry that runs between provisions. The window for looking is also short. When the Preparatory Committee meets in April 2027 the compiled text supersedes the individual filings, and the argument from then on is about a consolidated draft rather than about what each government was willing to write down before bargaining started.

What Governments Filed

Draft article 2 drew more amendments than any other provision, and almost all of them proposed new acts rather than cuts.

Five submissions wanted forced marriage, and no two framed it the same way. The United Kingdom devoted its entire filing to it, building a definition out of the RUF and AFRC judgments of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Case 002/02 before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and the Appeals Chamber in Ongwen. Poland argued that the wrong is a deprivation of relational autonomy and would move the act outside the sexual violence subparagraph altogether, since forced marriage “should not be considered as only another form of sexual violence.” Germany and Sierra Leone drafted a new subparagraph (j)bis. Brazil listed it beside sexual mutilation and forced abortion. Belgium, Colombia and Mexico treated it as a standalone crime and distinguished it carefully from arranged marriage. Elise Keppler and Maryanne Koussa had set out the case for it on 9 April, a few weeks before the deadline.

Slavery ran through four filings. Germany would add the slave trade, using the definition in the 1956 Supplementary Convention, and so would Sierra Leone with Gambia, Germany, Mexico and Uruguay. Russia did the same and asked the preamble to recall “that enslavement of Africans and trafficking of enslaved Africans as well as other crimes of colonialism were the gravest crimes against humanity.” Namibia worked on the preamble instead, asking it to reaffirm the enduring harm of slavery, the slave trade, colonialism, apartheid and deportation.

Apartheid drew two approaches. Afghanistan wrote gender apartheid into the existing apartheid provision, while Iceland, Mexico and Timor-Leste gave it a definition of its own. Mexico put starvation forward twice in different forms, jointly with Palestine as a freestanding act covering the destruction or denial of objects indispensable to survival, and in its own filing as an element of extermination reaching deprivation of access to food and medicine. Belgium and Colombia added two words to the sexual violence provision so that it covers reproductive violence of comparable gravity. The victim provisions went the same way, with Mexico on reparation for material and moral damage, Zambia on child-sensitive participation, and Poland adding age and disability to the grounds of persecution. Only two submissions cut anything, China and Brazil, both aiming at the residual provision on other inhumane acts.

The institutional provisions drew four filings in all. Portugal drafted three new articles, a monitoring and prevention mechanism, a Committee on Crimes against Humanity, and a Meeting of the Parties, reasoning that prevention requires “sustained attention to situations of risk” and “a forum in which States collectively overview their shared commitments”; it then left the Committee’s composition and working methods to an optional protocol concluded after entry into force. The five Nordic countries set out a committee of eighteen independent experts on a four-year reporting cycle with a confidential inquiry procedure, able to take a matter to the General Assembly where a State declines the inquiry. Germany endorsed a treaty-based monitoring mechanism in principle without drafting one. Nine States led by Belgium would delete paragraphs 3 and 4 of draft article 15 to make the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice compulsory, together with a bar on reservations. That is two actual designs, one endorsement in principle, and one proposal about the Court.

The objections converge more than the proposals do. China added new articles requiring respect for sovereign equality, territorial integrity and non-interference, and providing that nothing in the convention authorises a State party to exercise jurisdiction in the territory of another. Egypt would have the preamble affirm the principle “that national jurisdiction may not be exercised beyond the borders of the State.” Russia qualified the reparations obligation so that it operates “within the limits allowed by international law, including the respect for immunity of foreign States and their property.” Israel argued that deleting article 15(3) would “severely undermine… the foundational principle of consent in international adjudication” and endanger broad accession.

Why the Two Sides Came Out Differently

Institutional machinery is usually the easier concession. A reporting committee can be managed, deflected and starved of funding, whereas a criminal prohibition once written stays written. Governments treated the two the other way round, readier to enlarge the list of acts amounting to an international crime than to accept a standing body that could ask what they had done about those crimes.

Budgets can explain some of it. An addition to the text costs a State nothing on the day of adoption and can be defended at home as codifying jurisprudence that already exists, which is how the United Kingdom, Poland and Brazil each justified forced marriage. A committee costs something the moment it is codified into existence.

The rest is about who enforces. This convention obliges States to criminalise the listed conduct in domestic law, to establish jurisdiction, and to prosecute or extradite, and nothing more. Every act added to draft article 2 therefore enlarges the competence of the State’s own prosecutors and its own courts. A monitoring body would work the other way, subtracting from what a State may decide for itself, and that is probably why one drafted proposal came from Lisbon, one from the Nordic capitals, and none from anywhere else.

Two qualifications, and neither disturbs my larger point. These are not binding filings and a government that wrote nothing about monitoring in April can support a committee next year. Around two thirds of the membership submitted nothing at all, so the corpus measures drafting capacity as much as preference: some governments sent dozens of pages, the United Kingdom sent one proposal, and Peru sent the Draft Articles unchanged behind an express reservation of position “with respect to the entire text.” The claim is only about the governments that did write something down, and those wrote asymmetrically.

What Follows

The additions are worth noting. Forced marriage on the face of a treaty would change what prosecutors in many jurisdictions can charge, and I would rather the convention have it than not. What it cost the States that proposed it was small, and a reader who takes the breadth of draft article 2 as a sign that this convention will have teeth is reading the wrong provision.

Redirecting effort will be harder than it sounds, because the procedure favours whatever is already in the text. Very few submissions attacked the structure of the Draft Articles, which surprised me more than anything else in the corpus. Resolution 79/122 asked for amendments to numbered draft articles compiled into one text, so a State wanting to depart from the Commission’s framework has to argue provision by provision while every other delegation drafts from the Commission’s version. The 1994 draft statute for an international criminal court was also an ILC product, and the Ad Hoc Committee and Preparatory Committee that followed rebuilt substantial parts of it between 1995 and 1998. Nothing like that is happening here.

My guess is that the compiled text will carry most of the additions to draft article 2 forward, that forced marriage will end up in the convention, and that the institutional proposals will not survive in the form in which they were filed. If a monitoring body is adopted at all, it will most likely come as Portugal itself anticipated, as an optional protocol negotiated after entry into force among the States that want one. 

The Preparatory Committee meets for four days next April and the Conference does not open until 2028, which leaves about a year and a half. Draft article 2 needs very little of that time. Draft article 15 and the provisions proposed to follow it need all of it, and they a state to champion for institutional design what we saw the states have done in this round for forced marriage.

Author’s notes: A longer study of the amendment corpus is in preparation. Counts of submissions are the author’s own, taken from the compilation published in June 2026.