Criminal jurisdiction normally rests on a link between the prosecuting State and the offence, whether that link is territory, nationality or a threatened State interest. Universal jurisdiction is the one basis that needs no link, letting a State try a crime committed abroad, by a foreigner, against foreigners.
States disagree about what that absence of a link actually permits them to do, and the disagreement is about presence. Argentina and Ukraine investigate and issue arrest warrants while the accused is on another continent. Prosecutors in most of Europe move only once the suspect is physically inside their borders. Judges of the International Court of Justice divided openly on the point in the Arrest Warrant case, and their division sits in separate opinions rather than in anything the Court decided.
Both sides of that division share a rationale older than either position. Certain crimes were treated as offences against every State, so any State could punish them, and pirates supplied the original example on the reasoning that no sovereign governs the high seas. The modern case is more practical than that. Where a government has committed atrocities against its own population, the territorial State is the last place a prosecution will ever begin, so a court somewhere else is the only court available.
That practical case now produces a measurable caseload. The Universal Jurisdiction Annual Review 2026, published by TRIAL International in April 2026, counted 91 extraterritorial and universal jurisdiction cases across 20 countries, with 34 new cases opened or made public during 2025 and 23 convictions. Kosovo, Peru, Poland and Türkiye each took a step of this kind for the first time in 2025.
Whether an Indian court could ever do any of this turns on a single condition, and one short example makes that condition concrete. A retired senior officer of a foreign army, against whom a United Nations commission of inquiry has recorded findings of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, books a connecting flight through an Indian airport.
None of the usual connections between India and a crime is present here. He holds no Indian nationality, and none of his alleged victims were Indian nationals. Nothing he is accused of happened on Indian territory, and no Indian State interest was affected by any of it. On those facts the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 reaches none of his conduct, because every limb of its extraterritorial provision needs a connection that is missing here.
One fact changes the answer, and that fact is his presence. Section 3 of the Geneva Conventions Act, 1960 punishes a grave breach committed “within or without India” and applies to offenders regardless of their nationality or citizenship, and Section 4 makes such an offender triable at any place in India at which he may be found. An airport transit lounge is such a place. The accused who was beyond the reach of Indian criminal law while he remained abroad becomes triable the moment he lands.
States that may prosecute under universal jurisdiction without a nexus to the crime
A State may prosecute under universal jurisdiction where international law treats the crime as triable by anyone, and it needs no connection of territory, nationality or national interest before it does so. Every other basis of criminal jurisdiction works the other way round. The prosecuting State points to a link between itself and the offence, and that link is what justifies the prosecution. Universality drops the requirement and rests the claim on the character of the crime instead.
The starting point in international law is permissive rather than restrictive. The Permanent Court of International Justice decided in the SS Lotus case in 1927 that international law leaves States a wide measure of discretion to apply their criminal law to conduct abroad, and that a State need not find a permissive rule before acting. Later practice has narrowed that reasoning considerably, and no court today treats it as a licence to prosecute anything at all. It still explains why arguments in this area are usually about the limits on a State’s reach rather than about where its reach came from.
Extraterritorial jurisdiction and universal jurisdiction are not the same thing, and running the two together is the commonest error in summaries of the subject. A State exercises extraterritorial jurisdiction whenever it applies its criminal law to conduct outside its borders, which it ordinarily does because its own national committed the offence or its own national suffered it. Universality is the narrow subset of that category in which the prosecuting State has no interest of its own to assert, which is exactly why it needs a separate justification.
Four bases of jurisdiction that require a link to the crime
Four bases supply the link, and each of them names a different connection between the State and the offence. Territoriality rests on where the conduct happened, and it divides into a subjective form, where the offence began inside the State, and an objective form, where it was completed there. Active nationality rests on who committed the offence and passive personality on who suffered it. The protective principle rests on the interest that was threatened, which is the basis a State relies on when someone counterfeits its currency or forges its passports abroad.
Indian criminal law is built on the first two of these. Section 1(3) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 makes every person liable for what he does within India, which is plain territoriality. Section 1(5)(a) extends the Sanhita to an offence committed by “any citizen of India in any place without and beyond India”, which is active nationality stated in as few words as the concept allows.
Two further limbs sit inside the same sub-section, and neither of them is universality. Section 1(5)(b) covers any person on a ship or aircraft registered in India wherever that ship or aircraft may be, which is the flag principle and a recognised extension of territoriality. Section 1(5)(c) covers any person abroad who commits an offence targeting a computer resource located in India, which is the objective territorial or effects doctrine applied to cybercrime. An illustration attached to the section puts it concretely: an Indian citizen who commits murder abroad can be tried in any place in India in which he may be found.
Passive personality is the basis Indian law leaves out, and its absence matters for anyone asking what an Indian court can do for an Indian victim harmed abroad. No limb of Section 1(5) confers jurisdiction merely because the person injured was Indian. The protective principle is not stated in general terms either, although individual statutes on offences against the State supply something close to it. For a fuller treatment of how the recognised heads relate to one another, see the iPleaders explainer on jurisdiction in international law.
Piracy as the first crime to carry universal jurisdiction
Piracy is where universal jurisdiction began, and the rule survives today in treaty form. Article 105 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982 provides that “on the high seas, or in any other place outside the jurisdiction of any State, every State may seize a pirate ship or aircraft, or a ship or aircraft taken by piracy and under the control of pirates, and arrest the persons and seize the property on board”.
Four things in that sentence do the work. “Every State” means the seizing State needs no connection to the vessel, the pirates or the victims. “May” makes the power permissive, so no State is in breach for declining to act, and the place named is the high seas or anywhere outside the jurisdiction of any State, which keys the grant to a gap in territorial sovereignty rather than to the gravity of the conduct. A second limb of Article 105 then gives the courts of the seizing State the power to decide the penalties, which converts a power of arrest into a power to try.
A duty of cooperation sits beside that power. Article 100 obliges all States to cooperate to the fullest possible extent in the repression of piracy on the high seas. Article 101 then supplies the definition, which requires an illegal act of violence, detention or depredation, committed for private ends, by the crew or passengers of a private ship, and directed against another ship. The private-ends element keeps politically motivated attacks outside the definition, and the two-ship element keeps a mutiny outside it as well.
Piracy earned the exception because of a gap in sovereignty rather than because of the gravity of the crime. Pirates were treated as triable by anyone since the high seas belong to no State, so a rule confining prosecution to the territorial sovereign would have left no sovereign able to prosecute at all. Gravity entered the argument much later. Every crime added to the universal list since 1945 rests on the different rationale that the crime offends the international community as a whole.
Treaty drafters and the crimes they opened to universal jurisdiction
Treaty drafters did not open all four of the standard atrocity crimes to universal jurisdiction, and the conventions say so in their own words. Genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and torture appear together in almost every summary of the subject, as though one rule governed all four. Read against each other, the instruments behind them do three different things.
One group of texts lets any State prosecute. A second group makes the power conditional on the accused being present and on the forum State declining to extradite him. A third names a particular State and stops there, which leaves universality over those crimes resting on customary international law rather than on the treaty everyone cites for it.
Treaty texts that grant universal jurisdiction outright
The Geneva Conventions of 1949 impose universal jurisdiction rather than merely permitting it. A single article repeated across all four conventions, being Article 49 of the First, Article 50 of the Second, Article 129 of the Third and Article 146 of the Fourth, puts each party under an obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed grave breaches and to “bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts”.
Set that wording against Article 105 of the Law of the Sea Convention and the difference is immediate. “Shall bring” is mandatory where “may seize” is permissive, so a party that ignores a grave breach by a foreign national is in breach of the Convention itself. “Regardless of their nationality” removes the nexus expressly rather than by implication. The obligation to search adds something Article 105 never contemplated, which is a duty to go looking.
Grave breaches are defined, and the definition carries a limit on when the regime applies at all. Articles 50, 51, 130 and 147 of the four conventions list the qualifying acts, which include wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, wilfully causing great suffering, and unlawful deportation of protected persons. The grave-breaches regime applies to international armed conflict, so conduct in a purely internal conflict falls outside it and has to be reached, if at all, through customary international law or a domestic statute written more widely.
Torture is handled differently again, and the difference is a condition. Article 5(2) of the Convention against Torture, 1984 requires each State party to establish jurisdiction “in cases where the alleged offender is present in any territory under its jurisdiction and it does not extradite him pursuant to article 8”. Presence plus a refusal to extradite is what triggers the duty, so this is conditional universality and not the absolute kind. Article 5(3) then preserves any wider jurisdiction a State has already taken under its own law.
Article 7(1) states the obligation that follows from that jurisdiction. The State party in whose territory the alleged offender “is found” must, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for prosecution, which is the rule lawyers call aut dedere aut judicare, meaning either extradite or prosecute. In Questions relating to the Obligation to Prosecute or Extradite (Belgium v. Senegal), decided on 20 July 2012, the International Court of Justice held that Senegal had breached both Article 6(2) and Article 7(1) in relation to the former President of Chad. The Court held further that every State party has standing to invoke that responsibility, which turns the duty into one owed to all of them.
Treaty texts that withhold universal jurisdiction
The Genocide Convention confers no universal jurisdiction at all, and its jurisdiction article names a single national forum. Article VI of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948 provides that persons charged with genocide “shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction”. Two forums are named and no third is contemplated.
What Article V requires of the parties is narrower than it is often read to be. Each party undertakes to enact the legislation necessary to give effect to the Convention and to provide effective penalties, which is an obligation about penalties rather than about reach. Germany and Argentina do prosecute genocide committed elsewhere, but they do it under their own criminal codes read with customary international law, and not under Article VI. Anyone relying on the Convention alone for a universality claim is relying on a provision that says the opposite.
The International Criminal Court is not a universal jurisdiction court either, and treating it as one is the other error that recurs. Article 12(2) of the Rome Statute lets the Court act where the conduct occurred on the territory of a State party or where the accused is a national of a State party, which are territoriality and active nationality applied at the level of an institution. Article 13(b) adds a situation referred by the Security Council, which can reach a non-party but depends on a political decision by five permanent members. A fuller account of how the Court’s jurisdiction is triggered sits in the iPleaders explainer on the International Criminal Court.
Crimes against humanity occupy the oddest position of the four, because no convention on them is in force anywhere. The International Law Commission adopted draft articles on their prevention and punishment, and by Resolution 79/122 of December 2024 the United Nations General Assembly sent those draft articles to a conference of plenipotentiaries scheduled for 2028 and 2029, with preparatory meetings in January 2026 and April 2027. Until that conference produces a treaty, universality over crimes against humanity rests on customary international law and on whatever each national statute says, which is why Argentina could open a Rohingya file that no treaty text authorises in terms.
Courts asked to try an absent or immune accused under a universality claim
A universality claim that is good on the treaty text still fails in court on two recurring grounds, and only one of them has actually been decided. Immunity is the settled objection, and the International Court of Justice has ruled on it directly. Presence is the unsettled one, argued by judges in separate opinions and answered differently by different legal systems. Both are objections to the exercise of a jurisdiction rather than denials that the jurisdiction exists.
The gap between holding a jurisdiction and running a trial is where most universal jurisdiction files end. A prosecutor needs the accused, the evidence and a government willing to absorb the diplomatic cost, and any one of the three can be missing. Neither legal objection is the reason most files close, but the two of them are what produce judgments.
Practice has produced a third constraint that is not an objection raised by an accused at all, which is subsidiarity. Several European systems now require a prosecutor to consider whether the territorial State or an international tribunal is better placed before opening a file, and in Spain that consideration has been written into statute.
Immunity of serving officials against a universal jurisdiction claim
Immunity defeats a universality claim against a serving senior official, and the International Court of Justice said so on 14 February 2002. In the Arrest Warrant of 11 April 2000 (Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Belgium), the Court held by thirteen votes to three that Belgium had failed to respect the immunity from criminal jurisdiction and the inviolability that the Congo’s incumbent Minister for Foreign Affairs enjoyed under customary international law, and ordered Belgium to cancel the warrant.
The Congo’s pleading changed during the case, and the change is why the judgment says less than it is cited for. The Congo began by arguing that Belgium’s exercise of universal jurisdiction was itself unlawful, and then abandoned that submission and argued immunity alone. The Court therefore decided immunity and said nothing binding about universal jurisdiction, so any source citing Arrest Warrant as a holding on universality is citing a case for a proposition it did not reach.
Former officials are in a different position, and the House of Lords reached that conclusion three years earlier. In R v. Bow Street Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate, ex parte Pinochet (No. 3), decided on 24 March 1999, seven Law Lords held by six to one that a former head of State has no immunity in respect of torture, and allowed the Spanish extradition request to proceed.
The Lords attached a temporal limit to that conclusion, and it turned on when English courts acquired the jurisdiction at all. A majority held that English courts had no jurisdiction over torture committed abroad by a foreigner before Section 134 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 came into force on 8 December 1988, that section being the domestic provision by which the United Kingdom implemented the Convention against Torture. Charges falling before that date could not proceed, and extradition was approved in October 1999 on counts confined to the later period. The Convention on its own was not enough, because a domestic statute conferring the jurisdiction had to exist first.
Whether universal jurisdiction requires the accused to be present
Presence is required in most systems and dispensed with in a few, and no court of general authority has settled which approach international law demands. Judges of the International Court of Justice addressed the question in Arrest Warrant precisely because the parties had stopped arguing it, and what they wrote carries persuasive weight rather than binding force.
President Guillaume took the narrow view in his separate opinion, concluding that universal jurisdiction in absentia is unknown to international law apart from piracy. Judges Higgins, Kooijmans and Buergenthal took the opposite view in their joint separate opinion, concluding that a State exercising such jurisdiction is not acting unlawfully. Neither passage is part of the Court’s holding, and a student answer that presents either as the ratio has misread the judgment.
State practice has since split along the same line rather than resolving it. Germany, France and most other European systems require the suspect to be on their territory before a prosecution proceeds, which is why the German cases arising out of Syria followed the arrival of asylum seekers and defectors. Argentina and Ukraine take the absolute position and will investigate and issue warrants with the accused abroad, and the Argentine warrants of February 2025 were issued on exactly that footing.
Prosecutors in Europe and Latin America exercising universal jurisdiction
Prosecutors in a small group of States do almost all of this work, and the group has been widening since 2021. The Universal Jurisdiction Annual Review 2026 recorded 91 cases across 20 countries, and France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland account for the bulk of the European files. Argentina is the most active jurisdiction outside Europe.
Two movements run in opposite directions inside that record. European legislatures spent the decade after 2003 cutting back statutes their own courts had been using, while European prosecutors have spent the years since 2021 bringing the most significant convictions the principle has produced. Latin American courts moved the other way and widened their reach while Europe was narrowing.
A third position has run alongside both movements since 2009, and it comes from the States on the receiving end. At the request of Tanzania, acting for the Group of African States, the United Nations General Assembly placed the scope and application of the principle on its agenda for the sixty-fourth session, on the express ground that courts outside Africa were applying it disproportionately to African officials. The African Union has since urged its member States to answer such warrants on a basis of reciprocity. That item has stayed on the Sixth Committee’s agenda every year since, which is where the argument about selection now sits.
Belgium and Spain narrowing their own universal jurisdiction laws
Belgium wrote the most ambitious universal jurisdiction statute of the modern era and then repealed it under diplomatic pressure. The Law of 16 June 1993, as amended in 1999, allowed Belgian courts to prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in absentia and let victims file complaints directly, which produced filings against serving foreign leaders. After the Arrest Warrant judgment and sustained pressure from other governments, that law was repealed on 5 August 2003 and replaced with a regime requiring a connection to Belgium.
Spain followed the same path in two statutory steps. Organic Act 1/2009 introduced a requirement of a link to Spain, recognised the subsidiarity of Spanish jurisdiction to the International Criminal Court, and closed off the actio popularis route by which private complainants had been opening cases. Organic Act 1/2014 tightened the connection requirement much further, and Spanish courts closed files that had been running for years.
Germany moved in the opposite direction and produced the convictions. Prosecutions under its Code of Crimes against International Law led to the Koblenz judgments in the al-Khatib case in 2021 and 2022, which were the first convictions anywhere for State torture in Syria, and in June 2025 the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt sentenced a Syrian doctor to life imprisonment for torture and killings in military hospitals run by the Assad government. A further trial of a former Syrian prison guard opened in Germany on 27 April 2026.
Argentina produced the development that reaches furthest into South Asia. On 13 February 2025, a federal criminal court in Buenos Aires issued arrest warrants against Myanmar’s Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and other military officials over genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the Rohingya, on a case filed in 2019 by a Rohingya organisation based in the United Kingdom. Those were the first public arrest warrants against the Myanmar military in a universal jurisdiction case, and they were issued with every accused thousands of kilometres away. Kosovo, Peru, Poland and Türkiye each took a first step of this kind during the same year.
Indian courts and universal jurisdiction over piracy and grave breaches
Indian courts do exercise universal jurisdiction, over two classes of conduct only, and in both the statute makes the accused’s presence or custody the condition on which everything else depends. India has no general universal jurisdiction provision, and the general criminal code supplies none. What it supplies instead is a gateway.
Section 1(4) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 provides that any person liable “by any law for the time being in force in India” to be tried for an offence committed beyond India is to be dealt with under the Sanhita as if the act had been committed within India. That provision creates no jurisdiction of its own. It routes into the Sanhita whatever jurisdiction some other Indian statute has already conferred, and two statutes have conferred it.
Two Indian statutes that confer jurisdiction over conduct abroad
The Geneva Conventions Act, 1960 is India’s oldest universal jurisdiction statute and the wider of the two. Section 3(1) punishes any person who “within or without India” commits, attempts, abets or procures a grave breach of any of the Conventions, with death or imprisonment for life where the offence involves the wilful killing of a protected person and up to fourteen years in any other case. Section 3(2) states in one line that sub-section (1) “applies to persons regardless of their nationality or citizenship”.
Presence is the condition, and Section 4 supplies it. An offence under that Chapter committed outside India may be dealt with “as if it had been committed at any place within India at which he may be found”, so an accused who never enters India is beyond the statute however grave the allegation. Section 5 sends the trial to a Court of Session or higher. The Act is the domestic counterpart of the Geneva obligation to bring offenders before a party’s own courts regardless of nationality, and it has been on the statute book since 1960.
Piracy is covered by a much newer statute, and before it there was no Indian law defining the offence at all. The Maritime Anti-Piracy Act, 2022 received assent on 31 January 2023 and was published as Act 3 of 2023. Section 1(3) applies it to the high seas, and Section 2(1)(e) defines the high seas to include the exclusive economic zone and all waters beyond the jurisdiction of any other State. Section 3 opens with “Whoever commits any act of piracy”, which fixes no nationality requirement, and Section 2(1)(h)(iv) includes any act deemed piratical under customary international law.
Custody is the condition in that Act, stated more explicitly than in the 1960 statute. Section 9(i) gives the Designated Court jurisdiction where the offence is committed by a person “who is apprehended by, or is in the custody of, the authorised personnel or the police, regardless of the nationality or citizenship of such person”, and the proviso to Section 8 fixes the territorial jurisdiction by the Indian port of disembarkation. Section 14 deems offences under the Act extraditable under India’s existing treaties and extraditable on reciprocity where no treaty exists. Neither Indian statute takes the absolute Argentine position, and both would fail on the facts that Argentina acted on.
Jurisdiction India has not taken under the Torture Convention or the Rome Statute
India’s treaty position closes off the two routes a victim would look for first. India signed the Convention against Torture on 14 October 1997 and has not ratified it, so the duties in Articles 5(2) and 7(1) do not bind India, and the aut dedere aut judicare rule that produced Belgium v. Senegal has no application to an alleged torturer who lands in Delhi. India is also not a party to the Rome Statute, so no Indian national and no conduct on Indian territory falls within Article 12(2) of that Statute.
What India has joined, by contrast, it has implemented. India ratified the Law of the Sea Convention in 1995 and gave its piracy provisions domestic effect through the 2022 Act, and India is a party to the Geneva Conventions and implemented the grave-breaches obligation through the 1960 Act. The pattern across all four instruments is consistent: India accepts jurisdiction where a treaty it has ratified obliges it to, and legislates no further.
A victim of atrocities abroad therefore has a narrow set of Indian options. Grave breaches committed in an international armed conflict can be prosecuted here if the accused is found here, and piracy on the high seas can be prosecuted here if the accused is in Indian custody. Genocide, crimes against humanity and torture committed abroad by a foreigner against foreigners fall outside every Indian statute currently in force, whatever customary international law may permit, because Section 1(4) of the Sanhita needs an Indian law to route into and there is none.
Frequently asked questions
Is universal jurisdiction the same as the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court?
Universal jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court rest on opposite foundations. Universal jurisdiction is exercised by national courts with no connection to the crime, while the International Criminal Court acts under Article 12(2) of the Rome Statute only where the conduct occurred on the territory of a State party or the accused is a national of a State party, or under Article 13(b) where the Security Council refers a situation. The Court is a treaty body with a defined membership, not a court open to every crime committed anywhere.
Which crimes are actually covered by universal jurisdiction?
Piracy is covered by express treaty text in Article 105 of the Law of the Sea Convention, and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions are covered by the obligation in Articles 49, 50, 129 and 146 to try offenders regardless of nationality. Torture is covered on a conditional basis under Article 5(2) of the Convention against Torture, which requires the offender’s presence and a refusal to extradite. Genocide and crimes against humanity are not covered by any treaty text that grants universality, so prosecutions for them rest on customary international law and on national statutes.
Can a country prosecute under universal jurisdiction if the accused is not in the country?
A few States can and most cannot, and each has written the answer into its own procedure. Argentina and Ukraine investigate and issue arrest warrants with the accused abroad, which is how the Argentine court issued warrants against Myanmar officials in February 2025, while Germany, France and most other European systems require the suspect to be on their territory first. International law has not settled the question: President Guillaume concluded in Arrest Warrant that universal jurisdiction in absentia is unknown outside piracy, and Judges Higgins, Kooijmans and Buergenthal concluded in the same case that it is not unlawful.
Does India have universal jurisdiction over genocide or crimes against humanity?
Indian universal jurisdiction does not extend to genocide or to crimes against humanity committed abroad. It reaches grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions under Section 3 of the Geneva Conventions Act, 1960 and piracy under the Maritime Anti-Piracy Act, 2022, and nothing beyond those two. Section 1(5) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 reaches offences abroad only through nationality, the Indian flag or an effect on a computer resource in India, and Section 1(4) routes in jurisdiction conferred by other statutes rather than creating any.
Does a serving head of State or foreign minister lose immunity under universal jurisdiction?
A serving head of State or foreign minister keeps his immunity, and a universality claim does not displace it. The International Court of Justice held in Arrest Warrant on 14 February 2002 that an incumbent Minister for Foreign Affairs enjoys immunity from criminal jurisdiction and inviolability before foreign national courts, and ordered Belgium to cancel a warrant issued on a universality basis. Former officials are treated differently, and the House of Lords held in Pinochet (No. 3) in 1999 that a former head of State has no immunity in respect of torture.
What is aut dedere aut judicare?
Aut dedere aut judicare means either extradite or prosecute, and it is the rule stated in Article 7(1) of the Convention against Torture. A State party in whose territory an alleged torturer is found must either hand him over to a State entitled to try him or submit the case to its own prosecuting authorities. The International Court of Justice applied that obligation against Senegal on 20 July 2012 and held that any State party may invoke a breach of it.
References
- United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982, articles cited being 100, 101 and 105. https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/part7.htm
- Geneva Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 1949, article 146, with the parallel articles being 49 of the First Convention, 50 of the Second and 129 of the Third. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/article-146
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 1984, articles cited being 5 and 7. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/h2catoc.htm
- Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948, articles cited being V and VI. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/x1cppcg.htm
- Arrest Warrant of 11 April 2000 (Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Belgium), International Court of Justice, judgment 14 February 2002. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/121
- Questions relating to the Obligation to Prosecute or Extradite (Belgium v. Senegal), International Court of Justice, judgment 20 July 2012. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/144
- R v. Bow Street Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate, ex parte Pinochet Ugarte (No. 3), [2000] 1 AC 147, House of Lords, 24 March 1999.
- The Geneva Conventions Act, 1960 (Act 6 of 1960), sections cited being 3, 4 and 5. https://bombayhighcourt.gov.in/bhc/libweb/legislation/actc/1960.06.pdf
- The Maritime Anti-Piracy Act, 2022 (Act 3 of 2023), Gazette of India Extraordinary, 2 February 2023, sections cited being 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 14. https://prsindia.org/files/bills_acts/acts_parliament/2023/The%20Maritime%20Anti%20piracy%20Act,%202022.pdf
- The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (Act 45 of 2023), Gazette of India Extraordinary, 25 December 2023, section cited being 1. https://www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/250883_english_01042024.pdf
- Universal Jurisdiction Annual Review 2026, TRIAL International, published April 2026. https://trialinternational.org/universal-jurisdiction-tools/universal-jurisdiction-annual-review-ujar/
- United Nations General Assembly Resolution 79/122 of December 2024, on the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity. https://www.un.org/en/ga/sixth/79/cah.shtml
- Belgium, Law of 16 June 1993 concerning the punishment of grave breaches of international humanitarian law, amended 1999 and repealed 5 August 2003. https://www.hrw.org/news/2003/08/02/belgium-universal-jurisdiction-law-repealed
- The scope and application of the principle of universal jurisdiction, United Nations General Assembly Sixth Committee agenda item, included at the request of the United Republic of Tanzania on behalf of the Group of African States, sixty-fourth session, 2009. https://www.un.org/en/ga/sixth/71/universal_jurisdiction.shtml
- Argentina, arrest warrants of 13 February 2025 in the Rohingya universal jurisdiction case. https://verfassungsblog.de/argentinian-arrest-warrant-for-hlaing/
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should consult a qualified advocate before acting on any point discussed here.