Local Labels of International Crimes Human Dignity and Fair Labelling on Trial

This article examines how international crime labels are translated into domestic criminal law and interpreted by national courts, focusing on the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity. Through a comparative analysis of legislation and judicial practice in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, it explores varying degrees of legislative semiotic alignment and judicial interpretative alignment with international humanitarian and international criminal law. Drawing on a semiotic reading of the principle of fair labeling, this article analyses how domestic courts engage with partially aligned national provisions by selectively relying on international sources. Three core findings emerge. First, domestic legislatures translate in divergent ways the international prohibitions of outrages upon personal dignity, combining international references with local particularities. Second, despite these legislative differences, domestic courts converge in extending protected-person status to deceased persons, even where customary international law provides an uncertain basis for such inclusion. Third, severity increasingly functions as the primary limiting criterion yet is applied inconsistently in practice. This article argues that while local interpretative divergence may be justified, the expressive force of the label may be diluted when outrages upon personal dignity are stretched beyond the level of severity they were intended to convey.