The Transnationalisation of Criminal Law in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

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):  
Schwöbel-Patel Christine

The ‘core’ crimes set out in the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute - the crime of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and aggression - are overwhelmingly assumed to be the most important international crimes. In this chapter, I unsettle the assumption of their inherent importance by revealing and problematising the civilizational, political-economic, and aesthetical biases behind designating these crimes as ‘core’. This is done by shedding light on discontinuities in the history of the core crimes, and unsettling the progress narrative ‘from Nuremberg to Rome’. More specifically, crimes associated with drug control are placed in conversation with the accepted history of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to exemplify a systematic editing of the dominant narrative of international criminal law.


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’.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 642-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andre Vartan Armenian

The rapid development of international criminal law over a relatively short period of time has encouraged some commentators to construct linear, ‘progress narratives’ when writing on the history of the field. Such narratives depict international criminal law as subject to gradual improvement, starting as a highly politicised, abstract collection of principles, but eventually emerging as a neatly contoured, legitimate framework. However, from its inception, international criminal law has been inseparable from the selective application (or non-application) as well as selective creation (or non-creation) of law. Selectivity has taken numerous forms over the decades, and in some instances, has proven to be useful. However, as long as selectivity continues to exist, international criminal law will remain at odds with our wider conceptions of law.


2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-216
Author(s):  
Martin Wählisch

In October and November of 2012, the Appeals Chamber of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) issued two key decisions affirming the legality of the court and the use of trials in absentia of the accused. Highly disputed within Lebanon and throughout the international legal community, both decisions are crucial milestones in the developing history of the STL, and mark critical developments in the evolution of the international justice system and international criminal law.


Author(s):  
Gerry Simpson

In its judicial-doctrinal life, the establishment of an international criminal law has necessitated a sometimes half-hearted search for a history of largely inadequate ‘precedents’ in the context of the punishment of acts that are also said to be ‘unprecedented’ and in the shadow of a suspicion that the criminalization of such acts is itself ‘unprecedented’. Putting all of this together, we might say that what we have is a law of unprecedentedness to which it could be useful to apply a counter-history of unprecedents or unprecedenting or, even, re-precedenting. This idea of ‘unprecedents’ (a neologism that some people will be find unattractive), then, ought to make visible some pathologies, elisions, repressions, around—in one instance a possibility inherent in—international criminal law.


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):  
Werle Gerhard ◽  
Jeßberger Florian

This chapter sets down the legal and historical foundations of international criminal law. It begins with a brief overview of the history of international criminal law, beginning with the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty and ending with the developments after the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Statute. From there, the chapter discusses the concepts, aim, and legitimacy of international criminal law before turning to the role of international criminal law within the international legal order. Afterward, the chapter turns to the sources and interpretation of international criminal law as well as universal jurisdiction, the duty to prosecute, and transitional justice. Next, the chapter considers the relationship between international and domestic courts as well as the prosecution of international crimes under international law by international and ‘internationalised’ courts. Finally, this chapter closes with a discussion on international criminal law in practice.


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