The crime of apartheid: genealogy of a successful failure

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-214
Author(s):  
Adam Sitze

Abstract This article argues that international criminal law implies a specific form of conscience. It then traces the vicissitudes of that conscience throughout the history of the criminalisation of apartheid in international law. It concludes with three theses about the concept of ‘global apartheid’.

Author(s):  
Guilfoyle Douglas

This chapter focuses on transnational crimes. Though these were long part of the international criminal law (ICL) canon, it is only late in the discipline’s history that they became conceived as being something distinct. As such, while this chapter envisages the history of ICL, it also focuses more on the origin of the distinction in the Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind. This distinction, which became quite influential, foregrounded crimes under general international law and crimes of international concern as two separate categories. However, this chapter takes a skeptical view of the distinction, noting the ‘question begging’ character of defining international crimes on the basis of an implicitly accepted notion of what international crimes are. But this is not to say that the attempt at drawing distinctions is fruitless—in fact, it sustains relevant conversations about, for example, the intrinsic character of gravity of various crimes in relation to each other. But, as this chapter shows, it does point to an irreducible element of faith in any act of prioritization.


Author(s):  
Douglas Lawrence

This chapter argues that the development of the international law of aggression has served to destabilize a dominant narrative based on the distinction between criminal and enemy. The criminal/enemy dyad has long been central to the western legal tradition. By attending to how rival traditions of legal theory have understood the dyad, the chapter illustrates how the criminalization of aggression marks one of the most distinctive developments in the history of international criminal law. This development, however, has proven problematic, as the criminalization of aggression has worked to deconstruct the traditional boundary between criminal and enemy, volatizing the very distinction between war and policing. The criminalization of aggression marks, then, something distinct from simply a growth of international law; it signals a fundamental shift that has left the relations between jus ad bellum and jus in bello in an uncertain state.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (04) ◽  
pp. 48-52
Author(s):  
Erkin Humbat Musayev Humbat Musayev ◽  

Key words: international law, international criminal law, genocide, war crimes, transnational crime


2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 847-855 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIES VAN SLIEDREGT

Fragmentation of international law is a phenomenon that has been discussed ever since the ILC in 2000 decided to add to its programme of work the topic ‘Risks ensuing from the fragmentation of international law’. Koskenniemi, in a paper published in this journal, was one of the first to address fragmentation in legal literature. In 2006, he finalized a voluminous report on ‘Fragmentation of International Law’, providing for means and ways to cope with fragmentation.


Author(s):  
Hanna Kuczyńska

This article deals with the model for prosecuting Nazi crimes committed in Poland in the light of the model presently used in international criminal law. It tries to answer the question: should the investigation of crimes of international law be handed over to transnational tribunals? Should they be hybrid tribunals involving a national factor, or completely supra-national tribunals like the International Criminal Court? Is it legitimate to transfer jurisdiction over these matters to national courts? The case of unpunished Nazi crimes in Poland may give a partial answer to this question. Certainly, various attempts made after World War II, including procedures brought before Polish courts, have contributed to understanding the function of international criminal law, and finding the answer to the question of the best model for prosecuting crimes of international law. At present, we also have the experience of international criminal tribunals, in particular the ICC, which is an efficient machine for prosecuting crimes of international law. Interesting conclusions can be drawn from its functioning that could improve the work of Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) prosecutors, and shed new light on the considerations regarding the prosecution of Nazi crimes in Poland after World War II.


2019 ◽  

The volume contains nine case studies on the recent history of transnational criminal law, having emerged from current international research projects. The papers cover cross-border political crime and security threats, extradition and expulsion, police cooperation and international expert discussions on social crime and torture. The focus is less on event-historical phenomena, but on transnational legal-political interactions of different actors. The contributions thus analyze the historical development of transnational criminal law as a form of temporally, spatially and legally limited criminal law and security regimes. As a result, the volume shows that the investigated transnationalization of criminal law in the 19th and 20th centuries did not lead to a cohesive normative order, thus offering legal-historical interpretations of current problems of international criminal law.


Author(s):  
Tiyanjana Maluwa

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.


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