Irregular apprehension in international criminal law : male captus bene detentus?

The article aims to determine whether a male captus bene detentus principle is established in international law with regard to international crimes. The illegal abduction of individuals in order to bring them before a criminal court in another State does often violate the sovereignty of the State where the person is abducted, and it violates the human rights of the accused, constituting a form of arbitrary deprivation of liberty. A general rule male captus bene detentus, according to which the person illegally abducted could nonetheless legitimately be subjected to trial, does not seem to exist. Often States have required, and in various cases obtained, the restitution of individuals who had been illegally abducted from their territory, adducing a violation of their sovereignty. As for the human rights violations related to the illegal abduction, they have not been considered sufficient by tribunals to impose the release of the accused, unless they had been accompanied by further serious violations of the rights of the individual. No different rule seems to exist with regard to international crimes, but the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has in recent years devised a possible new doctrine on the issue. The need remains to reconcile the rights of the accused with the need to punish crimes, especially the most serious ones of international concern, and if the illegal abduction is not sufficient to impose the release of the accused, other means should be implemented in order to compensate for such a violation.