Aiding and abetting

Historically, aiding and abetting, as such, was not included in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal or the Charter of the Tokyo Tribunal. Rather, Control Council Law No. 10 first provided for the criminal prosecution of persons who were ‘accessor [ies] to the commission of any . . . crime or ordered or abetted the same’.1 Oddly, aiding and abetting was also not explicitly included in the 1950 Nuremberg Principles or the 1954 ILC Draft Code of Crimes – in both documents ‘complicity’ is employed2 – but it reappeared in Article 3(2) of the 1991 ILC Draft Code of Crimes and in Article 2(3)(d) of the 1996 ILC Draft Code of Crimes. Nonetheless, it is now consistently found in the Statutes of all modern international criminal tribunals