s.V Modalities, Ch.20 The Right to Truth in International Criminal Law

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bilsky Leora
Keyword(s):  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
The Right ◽  
Personal Interests ◽  
International Criminal Trials

This chapter asks whether victims have a ‘right’ to the truth, and if they do, whether international trials are the appropriate vehicle for vindicating that right. Many have argued for a limited role for international criminal trials, focused exclusively on the fate of individual defendants, while others seek to subordinate criminal trials to larger, historiographic goals of constructing a definitive record of atrocities and other violations. The chapter reframes these debates around the concept of ‘victim rights’, especially since the Rome Statute provides a privileged place for victims in the procedural mechanics of the International Criminal Court. The argument here is then developed through discussion of four areas of doctrine: the victims’ ‘personal interests’ in the determination of guilt, the recharacterization of charges against the defendant, the right of victims to introduce evidence, and victims’ obligation to disclose exonerating evidence. The chapter concludes that these developments, combined with the role of human rights law, has ushered in an ‘emerging truth regime’.

The Historical Function of International Criminal Trials: Re-thinking International Criminal Law

2004 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Joyce
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Due Process ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Social Recovery ◽  
Historical Function ◽  
International Criminal Trials

AbstractThe establishment of the International Criminal Court provides an opportunity to re-think international criminal law and procedure, and to develop a more coherent theory of international criminal justice. This article argues that increasingly the demands placed upon international criminal trials go beyond the process of securing convictions. There is an increasing expectation that such trials will contribute to broader processes of social recovery and reconciliation. Claims are also made for their having a pedagogical and documentary role. To this end, the author proposes the recognition of an historical function of international criminal trials. This is suggested as best forming part of the variety of policy rationales which underpin the processes of international criminal law. It is conceded that overemphasising the role of history could be dangerous and infringe upon the rights of the accused, but it is argued that underemphasising the role of theory and history is unsatisfactory. The article concludes that recognition of an historical function for international criminal trials involves tensions, but will provide a framework and rationale for a more narrative-based and victimfocused system of international criminal law which might provide an important discursive beginning for victims and affected communities, whilst balancing due process concerns.

scholarly journals The trial’s the thing: Performance and legitimacy in international criminal trials

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-257
Author(s):  
Kate Leader
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
International Criminal Trials

This article explores the relationship between performance and legitimacy in international criminal trials through the lens of the International Criminal Court (ICC). I begin by analysing the deployment of theatrical tropes by different legal scholars, such as Hannah Arendt, and David Luban, arguing that such analogies serve as a policing mechanism for the author to distinguish what they perceive to be the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ theatre of the trial. I then move beyond analogy, drawing on legal sociology and performance theory to read the criminal trial as ritual-like, normative performance. Using the ICC as a case study, I will examine how performance is deployed to create, reinforce and naturalize the role of the ICC in international criminal law. Through focusing on issues of performance and community I offer a different way of looking at what may constitute legitimacy in international criminal law from that which is offered by other legal scholars.

scholarly journals Trial and (Potential) Error: Conflicting Visions on Reparations Within the ICC System

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina Balta ◽  
Manon Bax ◽  
Rianne Letschert
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
International Criminal Court ◽  
Rome Statute ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Conflict Situations ◽  
International Criminal Trials

Twenty years ago, the International Criminal Court (hereinafter ICC or the Court) was established holding the aim of placing victims at the heart of international criminal justice proceedings and delivering justice to them through, among others, reparations. Article 75 of the Rome Statute lays out the reparations regime, and, in practice, court-ordered reparations are a means of delivering such justice. Focusing on Court decisions on reparations, our analysis takes stock of all developments before the ICC and attempts to highlight the mismatch between characteristics inherent to the objectives of international criminal trials such as providing accountability and punishment of the accused and delivering justice for victims of mass crimes—the so-called procedural challenges. We also submit that the Court is facing conceptual challenges, related to an apparent misunderstanding of the various concepts at stake: reparations as such and the various modalities and channels of enforcing them. We conclude that although the ICC’s reparation regime may not be the best reparative response to provide justice to victims in conflict situations affected by mass victimization, we suggest that improving the ICC’s approach includes, at a minimum, tackling these challenges.

The Contestation of Value-Based Norms: Confirmation or Erosion of International Law?

2019 ◽  
pp. 311-334
Author(s):  
Tiyanjana Maluwa
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
First Time ◽  
Normative Powers

The chapter discusses the concepts of shared values and value-based norms. It examines two areas of international law that provide illustrative examples of contestation of value-based norms: the fight against impunity under international criminal law and the debates about the responsibility to protect. It argues that the African Union’s (AU) difference of view with the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the indictment of Omar Al-Bashir is not a rejection of the non-impunity norm, but of the context and sequencing of its application. As regards the right of intervention codified in the Constitutive Act of the AU, Africans states responded to the failure of the Security Council to invoke its existing normative powers in the Rwanda situation by establishing a treaty-based norm of intervention, the first time that a regional international instrument had ever done so. Thus, in both cases one cannot speak of a decline of international law.

Like Ancient Beacons: The European Union and the International Criminal Court – Reflections from afar on a Chapter of European Foreign Policy

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (12) ◽  
pp. 1449-1467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kemmerer
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
European Law ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Human Rights Norms

That the Law is never frozen in time and space is quite a trivial insight – but one, however, that is nonetheless particularly true for the area of international human rights law and the jurisdiction to see human rights norms respected and enforced. No less is it true for international criminal law and European law. It is, of course, true at the intersection of these three fields of the law as well, exactly the place I intend to explore in this paper. And, as we shall see, poetry, that rarely unveiled subtext of the law, is never steady in its foundations.

scholarly journals Expressing what? The stigmatization of the defendant and the ICC’s institutional interests in the Ongwen case

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Liana Georgieva Minkova
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Operation Risk ◽  
International Criminal Trials ◽  
Empirical Contribution ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract The potential of international criminal trials to express the wrongfulness of mass atrocities and instil norms of appropriate behaviour within communities has been subject to a lively theoretical debate. This article makes an important empirical contribution by examining the limitations to the expressivist aspiration of international criminal justice in the context of the message communicated by the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor (ICC-OTP) in the Ongwen case. A detailed analysis of the selection of charges, modes of liability, and the overall presentation of the Prosecutor’s arguments at trial suggests that the ICC-OTP’s limited capabilities to apprehend suspects and its dependency on state co-operation risk the excessive stigmatization of the few defendants available for trial for the purpose of demonstrating the Court’s capability of prosecuting notorious criminals. As the only apprehended commander from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Dominic Ongwen has been presented by the ICC-OTP as the ‘cause’ of crimes committed in Northern Uganda without due regard for the degree of his alleged involvement in those crimes compared to other LRA commanders, the role of other actors in the conflict, or the significance of his own victimization as a child. Ongwen’s excessive stigmatization expressed the importance of the Ugandan investigation after a decade of showing no results. Yet, it also produced a simplistic narrative which failed to express the complexity of violence in Northern Uganda.

Part 6 The Trial: Le Procès, Art.67 Rights of the accused/Droits de l’accusé

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Schabas William A
Keyword(s):  
Rome Statute ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Penal Codes ◽  
Constitution Type ◽  
The Right ◽  
Law Texts ◽  
And Control

This chapter comments on Article 67 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Article 67 confers the right to a ‘fair hearing’ to an ‘accused’ person ‘[i]n the determination of any charge’. Article 67 closely resembles article 14(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as fair trial clauses found in national constitutions. It is not, however, a typical provision found within criminal or penal codes as such. In effect, such texts generally belong in constitution-type instruments, where their role is hierarchically superior to the criminal law texts that they frame and control.

scholarly journals Memorializing Dissent: Justice Pal in Tokyo

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 111-116
Author(s):  
Mark A. Drumbl
Keyword(s):  
International Criminal ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Far East ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Military Tribunal ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Second World

Memorials and monuments are envisioned as positive ways to honor victims of atrocity. Such displays are taken as intrinsically benign, respectful, and in accord with the arc of justice. Is this correlation axiomatic, however? Art, after all, may be a vehicle for multiple normativities, contested experiences, and variable veracities. Hence, in order to really speak about the relationships between the aesthetic and international criminal law, one must consider the full range of initiatives—whether pop-up ventures, alleyway graffiti, impromptu ceremonies, street art, and grassroots public histories—prompted by international criminal trials. Courts may be able to stage their own outreach, to be sure, but they cannot micromanage the outreach of others. And the outreach of others may look and sound strikingly different than that curated and manicured by courts. This essay presents one such othered outreach initiative: a memorial in Tokyo dedicated to Justice Radhabinod Pal of India, who authored a vehement dissent at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). The IMTFE was established in 1946 to prosecute Japan's leadership in the aftermath of the Second World War. Pal would have acquitted each defendant. This essay describes Justice Pal's legal philosophy, situates his place in the currents of international law, and reflects on the broader role of memorials as discursive sites.

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