SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Article 32(2) of the Rome Statute provides that ‘[a] mistake of law may … be a ground for excluding criminal responsibility if it negates the mental element required by such a crime’. Although this provision has been described as ‘cryptic’, I argue in this essay that it was specifically drafted to recognize what common-law scholars have variously called ‘mistake of mixed fact and law’, ‘mistake of legal fact’, and — most usefully — ‘mistake of legal element’: namely, a mistake regarding the definition of a legal element in a crime. A perpetrator who commits a mistake of legal element (MLE) cannot be said to have acted ‘knowingly’ with regard to that element, and is thus entitled to an acquittal if the element requires knowledge. Although most scholars accept the idea that at least some MLEs are exculpatory under Article 32, they uniformly insist that very few MLE defences will be successful. I disagree, for three reasons. First, nearly every crime in the Rome Statute contains at least one legal element. Second, the methods that the drafters of the Elements of Crimes used to limit MLEs — providing that legal elements only require knowledge of the underlying facts and replacing Article 30's default knowledge requirement with a simple negligence standard — are almost certainly inconsistent with the Rome Statute. Third, all of the mechanisms that scholars have proposed to limit MLEs — such as subjecting them to German criminal law's ‘layman's parallel evaluation’ test — are inconsistent with Article 32's common-law foundations. Properly understood, therefore, Article 32 potentially recognizes a wide variety of exculpatory MLEs. That is a disturbing prospect, because there is no reason why soldiers should not be expected to have at least a reasonable understanding of international humanitarian law. I thus conclude the essay by arguing that MLEs should be eliminated by specifically amending the Rome Statute to apply a negligence standard to legal elements.