Obligations to ‘Strangers’

Proceeding from the assumption that international criminal justice is a cosmopolitan project, the article advances a reconceptualized understanding of cosmopolitanism as a theoretical basis for collective action in ensuring accountability for international crimes. The article examines the building blocks of cosmopolitanism, and how the concept’s emphasis on equality and unity of the human family can guarantee its fundamental values of human dignity and shared humanity. Based on the understanding that international crimes assault humanity’s fundamental and cosmopolitan value of human dignity, and that accountability for such crimes is a cosmopolitan objective, the article advances the argument that while accountability for international crimes is primarily the obligation of individual sovereign states, this responsibility is ultimately residually one of humanity as a whole, exercisable through humanity’s collective action such as through regional intergovernmental organizations where an individual state is unable or unwilling by itself to do so.