Grounding the standing to prosecute atrocities

Crimes against humanity are widespread and systematic attacks on civilian populations, sometimes committed by officials of a state against citizens of that state. These atrocities are inhumane acts that intentionally make the lives of the victims impossible, intolerable or indecent. In the words of the International Criminal Court these crimes "shock the conscience of mankind." In the aftermath of these atrocities victims and those who stand in solidarity with them call for justice. But who has the authority to answer this call for justice? More pointedly, if we are to respect the political autonomy of states, how could any international institution have the standing to prosecute perpetrators of a crime that has occurred solely within the borders of that state?;In response to this question, I develop an Alternative Cosmopolitan Account (ACA), wherein I argue that an international tribunal could have the standing to redress these crimes in virtue of being part of a global institutional structure necessary for fulfilling the demands of justice, in particular, by making determinate the content of what we owe to one another as members of a global moral community. I begin my account with a commitment to minimal cosmopolitanism: that each person stands in a morally salient relationship with each other person, and that this requires that we view one another as objects of moral concern. I argue that the obligations we have to one another in virtue of this relationship are not determinate without a mediating political institution that can provide a coherent, univocal, enforceable system of law. This problem of indeterminacy requires a global mediating institution that articulates both law between states (international law) and between individuals (cosmopolitan law), of which the prohibition on crimes against humanity is a part.