Doctor Legum - LLD / It is rare in law and in other disciplines for a word or a phrase to appear to mean what it does not. This is, however, true when it comes to life imprisonment or life sentence. I Unlike sentences like the death penalty, there have been instances where even those who are expected to know the meaning of the sentence of life imprisonment have misunderstood it.2 This misunderstanding is compounded by the fact that even dictionaries that have always helped us to understand the meaning of the words are of little help when it comes to the definition of life imprisonment. The Oxford Advanced Leamer's Dictionary, for example, defines life sentence to mean 'the punishment by which [some body] spends the rest of their life in prison." It goes ahead to define a 'lifer' as 'a person who has been sent to The ambiguity of life imprisonment could partly explain why the campaign prison for their whole life. The ambiguity of life imprisonment could partly explain why the campaign to abolish the death penalty and substitute it with life imprisonment has option to choose between the death penalty and life-imprisonment, many been successful in many parts of the world. When people are given the option to choose between the death penalty and life-imprisonment, many would oppose the former and favour the latter for various reasons. This is because, inter alia, many people think that an offender sentenced to life imprisonment will be detained for the rest of his natural life. This is of course not true in some cases, and, as Lord Mustil held, The two tribunals that were established after the World War III, the Nuremberg Tribunal and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Tokyo Tribunal, were empowered to impose the death penalty and indeed, as will be discussed later in detail, some offenders were sentenced to death." Although these tribunals were not expressly empowered to 2 sentence offenders to life imprisonment, they did sentence some of the offenders to life imprisonment. However, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) all have jurisdiction to sentence offenders to life imprisonment. At the time of writing, the ICC had not completed any case and therefore had no jurisprudence on life imprisonment." The ICTR has sentenced more offenders to life imprisonment and imprisonment for the remainder of their lives than the ICTY. This thesis reviews cases on life imprisonment in international criminal tribunals in order to examine the theories of punishment that these tribunals considered in sentencing offenders to life imprisonment. There are cases where the ICTR has sentenced offenders to imprisonment for the rest of their natural lives. From a human rights perspective the thesis argues that imprisonment for the remainder of the offender's natural life is inhuman punishment. The statutes of the ICTY, ICTR and ICC provide for circumstances where an offender sentenced by any of those tribunals could be released before the completion of his or her sentence. It is on that basis that it is argued that even offenders sentenced to 3 imprisonment for the remainder of their lives by the ICTR could be released.