The Law of International Criminal Procedure and Domestic War Crimes Trials

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 605-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Göran Sluiter
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Procedure ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
National Courts ◽  
International Criminal Tribunals ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
The Law ◽  
Do So

AbstractThis article deals with the question of possible effect of the law of international criminal procedure for domestic war crimes trials. With the increasing number of national prosecutions for war crimes this question will gain in relevance.The article starts with an exploration of the origin and development of the law of international criminal procedure, to reach the conclusion that because of the lack of a strong foundation it is difficult to discern firmly established rules in this field. Next, two areas are examined where the law of international criminal procedure is capable of producing effect for national trials: human rights and rules that have developed in the specific context of war crimes prosecutions.Whether rules of international criminal procedure are formally effective in the domestic legal order remains to be seen. There is no clear obligation under international law to do so. Furthermore, the law of international criminal procedure may be difficult to harmonise with domestic inquisitorial systems.In spite of these difficulties, the article concludes that national courts will increasingly face similar procedural problems in complex war crimes trials as international criminal tribunals and will be happy to learn from their experiences.

scholarly journals Nazi Crimes in Poland. A Never-Ending Search for Justice

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-160
Author(s):  
Hanna Kuczyńska
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
World War ◽  
National Courts ◽  
International Criminal Tribunals ◽  
Efficient Machine

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.

The work of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission

2003 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 435-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
George H. Aldrich
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Rare Event ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
International Tribunal ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
Common Boundary ◽  
International Criminal Tribunals ◽  
The Creation

The Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission (EECC) is one of a pair of commissions established by the Peace Agreement of 12 December 2000 that ended a costly war between Ethiopia and Eritrea that had begun in May 1998. That war, which was sparked by disputes over the countries' common border, caused much damage and many thousands of casualties on each side. It also proved terribly expensive, as each party spent large amounts of money and incurred large debts to acquire modern weapons of war and the related munitions. Given the causes and the consequences of the war, it was, perhaps, not surprising that the Peace Agreement created a boundary commission to determine for the parties a common boundary that they would be obliged to accept, and a claims commission to resolve the claims of each party against the other for any acts arising out of the war that injured that party, including injury to its nationals, and that were in violation of international law.However understandable in the context of the war, the creation of an international commission charged with determining which actions of the parties to a war violated the applicable international law is a rare event. While we have seen very recently the establishment of international criminal tribunals for the punishment of war crimes by individuals, we have not seen the creation of any other international tribunal that has the task of deciding the legal responsibility of a state for violations of the laws of war.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia: Developing the Law on Sexual Violence?

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 452-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Williams ◽  
Emma Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Khmer Rouge ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
International Criminal Tribunals ◽  
Systematic Feature ◽  
The Law ◽  
Do So ◽  
Democratic Kampuchea

Widespread sexual violence was a feature of Democratic Kampuchea, whether during forced marriages, as an instrument of torture, or as a systematic feature of Khmer Rouge policy, with rape often the precursor to execution. Since it was established, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (eccc) has secured a single conviction of sexual violence. This article draws on the eccc’s jurisprudence and decisions of other international criminal tribunals to argue that, to date, the eccc has made little contribution to the development of the legal framework surrounding sexual violence. However, there remain several possibilities for it to do so.

The Diplomacy of Universal Jurisdiction: The Political Branches and the Transnational Prosecution of International Crimes

2011 ◽  
Vol 105 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máximo Langer
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Universal Jurisdiction ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
International Crimes ◽  
International Criminal Tribunals

Under universal jurisdiction, any state in the world may prosecute and try the core international crimes— crimes against humanity, genocide, torture, and war crimes—without any territorial, personal, or national-interest link to the crime in question whenit was committed.The jurisdictional claim is predicated on the atrocious nature of the crime and legally based on treaties or customary international law. Unlike the regime of international criminal tribunals created by the United Nations Security Council and the enforcement regime of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the regime of universal jurisdiction is completely decentralized.

14. International Criminal Law

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Dixon ◽  
Robert McCorquodale ◽  
Sarah Williams
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Political Will ◽  
National Courts ◽  
International Criminal Tribunals

This chapter addresses the prosecution of crimes in international criminal courts according to international—not national—criminal law. International law has long recognised that certain conduct, for example piracy and slavery, are crimes against international law which may be tried by international bodies or by any State. This principle has been expanded to cover more substantive crimes. International mechanisms for criminal accountability may be established where national courts have failed or are unable to try offenders due to a lack of political will, insufficient resources, deficiencies in national law, and/or ongoing conflict. The establishment and jurisdiction of the existing international criminal tribunals, including the International Criminal Court, are considered.

Fairness in National Courts Prosecuting International Crimes: The Case of the War Crimes Chamber of Bosnia-Herzegovina

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 712-734
Author(s):  
James Meernik ◽  
Josue Barron
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Crimes ◽  
National Courts ◽  
Bosnian War ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
Lower Ranking ◽  
The Impact

The Bosnian War Crimes Chamber was established to adjudicate cases of violations of international law by lower-ranking individuals in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who were not prosecuted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). One of the most critical issues facing this Court, however, is whether its justice is unbiased by the ethnic divisions that characterized the Bosnian War (1992–1995) and the politics of Bosnia-Herzegovina ever since. Using a new database of first instance verdicts from the War Crimes Chamber (WCC), we test for the impact of ethnic bias on verdicts and sentences. While initial analyses seem to suggest such bias may exist, our multivariate model of sentencing indicates that other factors such as the gravity of the crimes and individual circumstances play a more powerful role than ethnicity.

The problematic aspects of International core crimes and transnational crimes accordingly to International Law

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (31) ◽  
pp. 376-388
Author(s):  
Nadiia Shulzhenko ◽  
Snizhana Romashkin ◽  
Mykola Rubashchenko ◽  
Hаlyna Tatarenko
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Small Range ◽  
International Crimes ◽  
International Criminal Tribunals ◽  
International Conventions

Today, the boundaries of international crime involving states and transnational organized crime are slowly blurring, and as a result, the number of international crimes is steadily growing. The article analyzes two key groups of crimes: crimes indicated in the Rome Statute and transnational crimes under international conventions. This article is based on the analysis of the main groups of crimes: the first group of international crimes committed with state actors, which includes crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes of aggression, crimes of genocide; and the second group, crimes committed by criminal groups organized in more than one country with the "international" or "transnational" character of such acts. The authors emphasize the norms of international law, according to which the International Criminal Court, together with international criminal tribunals, have jurisdiction over a small range of key international crimes, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, aggression, committed by state officials. The main objective of this research is to compare the mechanism for investigating crimes in the jurisdiction of international criminal tribunals and the International Criminal Court, together with the national procedure for investigating transnational crimes, through the ratification of international conventions and the establishment of the International cooperation. The article was made with the following methods: induction, deduction, analogy, as well as historical, dialectical and formal legal methods.

Justice and the faithless: The demand for disobedience in international criminal law

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 344-366
Author(s):  
Bronwyn Leebaw
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
War Crimes Trials

How is disobedience required under international criminal law? How do war crimes trials demand and seek to cultivate disobedience as a response to atrocity? It is widely recognized that international law may require disobedience as a response to domestic authorities that order or legalize war crimes, yet this obligation to disobey is commonly conceptualized as a kind of byproduct of efforts to establish compliance with international norms. Drawing on empirical and theoretical scholarship analyzing “crimes of obedience,” this article investigates the demand for disobedience as articulated in international legal conventions and in war crimes trials dealing with lower-level soldiers and civilian authorities. It argues that disobedience is an important response to war crimes and that the capacity to disobey abusive authorities does not follow logically or inevitably from a commitment to obey laws that criminalize their abuses. In international criminal law, the obligation to disobey abusive authorities has been articulated in ways that require the exercise of critical judgment, as well as moral and political agency, in order to overcome various pressures to obey domestic authority. Prominent theoretical explanations of compliance with international law not only neglect the importance of such skills, but call for strategies that are in tension with their development. Closer attention to the role of exemplary disobedience in the legal reasoning animating war crimes prosecutions, I suggest, could strengthen the pedagogical role of legal institutions as a response to criminal obedience and as interventions in the politics of memory.

JAK LUDOBÓJSTWO ZOSTAŁO UZNANE ZA ZBRODNIĘ – DZIEDZICTWO RAFAŁA LEMKINA

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam MCFARLAND ◽  
Katarzyna HAMER
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Genocide Convention ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
Criminal Charge ◽  
Short Biography ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Change ◽  
History Of

Raphael Lemkin is hardly known to a Polish audiences. One of the most honored Poles of theXX century, forever revered in the history of human rights, nominated six times for the Nobel PeacePrize, Lemkin sacrificed his entire life to make a real change in the world: the creation of the term“genocide” and making it a crime under international law. How long was his struggle to establishwhat we now take as obvious, what we now take for granted?This paper offers his short biography, showing his long road from realizing that the killing oneperson was considered a murder but that under international law in 1930s the killing a million wasnot. Through coining the term “genocide” in 1944, he helped make genocide a criminal charge atthe Nuremburg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders in late 1945, although there the crime of genocidedid not cover killing whole tribes when committed on inhabitants of the same country nor when notduring war. He next lobbied the new United Nations to adopt a resolution that genocide is a crimeunder international law, which it adopted on 11 December, 1946. Although not a U.N. delegate – hewas “Totally Unofficial,” the title of his autobiography – Lemkin then led the U.N. in creating theConvention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 9 December, 1948.Until his death in 1958, Lemkin lobbied tirelessly to get other U.N. states to ratify the Convention.His legacy is that, as of 2015, 147 U.N. states have done so, 46 still on hold. His tomb inscriptionreads simply, “Dr. Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), Father of the Genocide Convention”. Without himthe world as we know it, would not be possible.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document