International Criminal Adjudication Research Articles

Towards a Normative Assessment of Probative Value in International Criminal Adjudication

Abstract The trial is an epistemic event. Yet, the manner in which the probative value of legal evidence is calculated remains largely unarticulated. Thus, in the face of an urgent requirement to advance a normative model of evidential reasoning which serves the needs of decision-makers, practitioners, and experts, this article assesses the utility of three dominant approaches, founded upon the exposition of inferences, scenarios, and probabilities. These find expression in Wigmorean, Narrative, and Bayesian network models, and a number of hybrid approaches. Through an analysis and critique of the foregoing models, the article attempts to discern the optimal normative model of evidential reasoning to be applied in international criminal trials, consonant with Twining’s formulation of rational adjudication, and assessed in accordance with a set of rational evaluation criteria drawn from New Evidence scholarship and its historical forbears.

Law Development by the International Criminal Court as a Way to Enhance the Protection of Minorities - The Case for Intersectional Consideration of Mass Atrocities

Mass atrocities almost invariably involve the targeting of racial, ethnic, religious and/or political groups. Other groups, such as homosexuals, have also been vulnerable to targeted destruction. Both experience and international case law demonstrate that atrocity crimes have mostly been inflicted on minorities within minorities. With individuals being targeted on several personal grounds or due to overlapping identities (for example, women and girls belonging to ethnic or religious minorities) there is a strong case for both scholarship and international criminal judiciary to develop an expertise on intersectional discrimination in the context of international crimes that implicate discriminatory intent of a perpetrator. Yet, the International Criminal Court (ICC or Court) has tended to consider atrocities motivated by discrimination on isolated discriminatory grounds and independently from each other. As a prescriptive contribution, the present article challenges this trend by arguing that in more complex criminal cases the protected characteristics need to be considered together with, and not separately from, one another, in order to capture the multi-faceted experiences of mass abuses. Underlying the treatment of the subject matter are thus two basic questions: first, given a full respect for the principle of legality (nullum crimen sine lege), what are the possible avenues for international criminal adjudication to recognize intersectionality so as to overcome conceptual flaws and limitations of single-issue analysis of discrimination in cases involving core international crimes against minorities? For example, can Article 21(3) of the Rome Statute on the interpretation and application of substantive international criminal law in light of international human rights standards serve as a viable tool for the Court to evolve its jurisprudence on this particular issue? Second, how and to what extent should the Court take intersectionality into consideration in the formulation of charges; identification and interpretation of applicable law; determination of criminal sentence; ordering adequate remedies (reparations) for victims; and in considering such aspects as the gravity assessment, or the contextualisation of crimes? Answering these questions, the article shows that by applying, interpreting and, when need be, developing international criminal law in a way that utilizes intersectionality the ICC can make in these areas important jurisprudential contributions with far-reaching socio-legal implications.

Law Development by the International Criminal Court as a Way to Enhance the Protection of Minorities—the Case for Intersectional Consideration of Mass Atrocities

Abstract Mass atrocities almost invariably involve the targeting of racial, ethnic, religious and/or political groups. Other groups, such as homosexuals, have also been vulnerable to targeted destruction. Both experience and international case law demonstrate that atrocity crimes have mostly been inflicted on minorities within minorities. With individuals being targeted on several personal grounds or due to overlapping identities (for example, women and girls belonging to ethnic or religious minorities) there is a strong case for both scholarship and international criminal judiciary to develop an expertise on intersectional discrimination in the context of international crimes that implicate discriminatory intent of a perpetrator. Yet, the International Criminal Court (ICC or Court) has tended to consider atrocities motivated by discrimination on isolated discriminatory grounds and independently from each other. As a prescriptive contribution, the present article challenges this trend by arguing that in more complex criminal cases the protected characteristics need to be considered together with, and not separately from, one another, in order to capture the multi-faceted experiences of mass abuses. Underlying the treatment of the subject matter are thus two basic questions: first, given a full respect for the principle of legality (nullum crimen sine lege), what are the possible avenues for international criminal adjudication to recognize intersectionality so as to overcome conceptual flaws and limitations of single-issue analysis of discrimination in cases involving core international crimes against minorities? For example, can Article 21(3) of the Rome Statute on the interpretation and application of substantive international criminal law in light of international human rights standards serve as a viable tool for the Court to evolve its jurisprudence on this particular issue? Second, how and to what extent should the Court take intersectionality into consideration in the formulation of charges; identification and interpretation of applicable law; determination of criminal sentence; ordering adequate remedies (reparations) for victims; and in considering such aspects as the gravity assessment, or the contextualisation of crimes? Answering these questions, the article shows that by applying, interpreting and, when need be, developing international criminal law in a way that utilizes intersectionality the ICC can make in these areas important jurisprudential contributions with far-reaching socio-legal implications.

Towards a Normative Assessment of Probative Value in International Criminal Adjudication

Towards a Normative Assessment of Probative Value in International Criminal Adjudication

History in International Criminal Trials

Abstract While the question of whether international criminal courts and tribunals (ICTs) ought to write historical narratives of armed conflicts is an old one, it has gained renewed relevance in the context of the recent turn to history in international criminal law and the minimal attention paid to historical context in the first judgment of the International Criminal Court. The ‘proper’ place of history-writing in international criminal adjudication remains controversial, and even though some judges have preferred to de-emphasize it, the fact remains that ICTs are epistemic engines, systematically and inevitably producing knowledge about the conflicts that come before them. This article develops a framework for analysing the historical knowledge generated by ICTs, namely, the ‘crime-driven lens’. It argues that this lens is characterized by two important constraints, one qualitative, relating to interpretation and the other quantitative, relating to scope, both of which may give rise to blind spots. In the final analysis, while the important contributions of ICTs to deepening understanding of the histories of armed conflicts should not be underestimated, the constraints of the ‘crime-driven lens’ and its blind spots have to be taken into account when assessing their historical legacies.

Eichmann’s Mistake: The Problem of Thoughtlessness in International Criminal Law

Atrocities are often unprecedented and identifying them therefore may require moral and political judgement, not only the application of legal rules. Consequently, potential defendants charged for perpetrating them may be genuinely unable to recognize the law that prohibits their criminal activity. Starting from its classical treatment in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, this problem has perplexed scholars who have noted the seemingly normal character of defendants in mass atrocity cases. In disagreement with other scholars in the area, I argue for a recognition of a “mistake of law”? defense in international criminal law. The Article demonstrates the stakes of the claim through three hypothetical international criminal cases with different political underpinnings, all pertaining to burning contemporary concerns: cases against individuals responsible for the enormous risks of climate change; against abusers of migrants in the context of border enforcement; and against individuals responsible for the termination of pregnancies in abortion clinics. I argue for a dual approach: on the one hand, prosecutors and judges must constantly leave open the possibility of a radical departure from extant doctrine and precedent in charging individuals. On the other, they must recognize that defendants may reasonably not be able to recognize the law qua law, especially when such departures occur. The internal tension between these two imperatives sheds light on the predicament of international criminal adjudication. A recognition of the proposed mistake of law defense is but a modest doctrinal solution for a much more fundamental perplexity of the discipline. Yet it is especially crucial today, with an ever-clearer normative divergence among actors in the “international community.”?

Radical Dissents in International Criminal Trials

International criminal law, for much of its history, has been a law characterized by dissents. However, international law scholarship has largely ignored the role of the dissenting opinion in shaping the discourse of international criminal law. This Article critically examines the nature and function of dissents at international criminal tribunals at a particularly crucial moment in the life of these courts, when the project of establishing accountability of mass atrocity through criminal trials is increasingly under attack. The Article argues that the dissenting opinion is a crucial legal device that can have a transformative potential in international criminal adjudication through its creation of a civic space for contestation that paradoxically shores up the legitimacy of the international criminal trial. To this end, it constructs a discrete category of dissenting opinions at international criminal courts: “radical dissents”. The content and rhetorical style of a radical dissent enables actors invested in the project of international criminal justice to use it as a vital dissentient voice both within and outside the courtroom. Agents who operate within the confines of the legal trial, such as defendants, lawyers, appellate chambers, and future judges, may channel its authority to challenge the idiom in which the majority judgment speaks. Likewise, the radical dissent could provide a legal language through which academics, victims, civil society, and other affected communities continue to grapple with constructing and coming to terms with events that defy human understanding.

The Paradox of Dissent

Additional opinions — dissenting opinions, separate opinions, declarations, and permutations thereof — are a familiar, if sometimes controversial, aspect of the international jurisprudential landscape. Given that the controversy provoked by additional opinions focuses on their perceived impact on the authority of judgments and decisions of international tribunals, and even the authority of the institutions themselves, additional opinions go to the heart of the manner in, and effectiveness by, which international tribunals discharge their functions. Yet, particularly in the context of international criminal justice, additional opinions have often been overlooked as a subject of critical engagement in their own right. Therefore, the purpose of this article is bring into focus the practice of judicial dissent, that is, the expression of strongly held and fundamental disagreement by judges through the vehicle of the additional opinion, and to stimulate a wider critical engagement with dissentient judicial practice. Rather than providing a review of the orthodox and doctrinal arguments in favour and against the publication of additional opinions, this article offers a reading of five prominent examples of judicial dissent in international criminal law and suggests how this practice could be conceived from the perspective of the functions that international criminal adjudication is expected to serve.

Knowing Women

This article considers how international criminal courts produce knowledge about women’s experiences of large-scale violence. In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia concluded that the crime of genocide had been committed in Srebrenica in 1995 and that the patriarchal nature of the Bosnian Muslim community was key to the genocide. This paper examines the processes by which the trial and appeal chambers came to know, and author an account of this community as patriarchal. I examine the transcripts of three witnesses who testified about the surviving community of Bosnian Muslim women, tracing how evidence was shaped and reshaped in the courtroom and then in the trial and appeal judgments. I argue here for the importance of exploring the mediating practices and actors that produce legal knowledge, to better understand how complex recognition of gendered harm unfolds, and is sometimes curtailed, through international criminal adjudication.

Precedent in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals

This article examines the use of precedent in international criminal adjudication and engages with the `theory of precedent' suggested by Daniel Terris, Cesare P R Romano and Leigh Swigart. The article considers the inapplicability of the doctrine of binding precedent in this area. It also examines the principle of judicial comity, discussing instances in which international criminal courts and tribunals have appeared to depart from the findings of external judicial decisions. It further considers the reliance of such courts and tribunals on judicial decisions from both generalist and specialist international courts, as well as from national courts, examining the process of transposition associated with such reliance. It finds that the approaches of international criminal courts and tribunals to the use of external judicial decisions have generally been multiple, incoherent and, in some cases, contradictory. In this respect, the article finds little evidence for the view that it is possible to distil any consistent `theory of precedent' from the practice of such courts and tribunals.

How Serious are International Crimes? The Gravity Problem in International Criminal Law

International criminal law was born out of the Holocaust – the systematic extermination of millions of people by a government attempting to annihilate a race. It was the gravity of those crimes that provided the theoretical and political justifications for the first international criminal trials at Nuremberg. Yet today, the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor is considering situations involving as few as six killings and an international tribunal has been established to address the assassination of a single political leader. This Article explains how the ambiguity of international criminal law’s foundational concept of gravity has facilitated this expansion. It exposes the consequences of expansion for state sovereignty and individual rights, and suggests a solution that moves beyond ambiguous gravity to interrogate the interests at stake in decisions about international criminal adjudication.

Sex Representation on the Bench and the Legitimacy of International Criminal Courts

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between legitimacy and the presence of both male and female judges on international criminal court benches. It argues that sex representation – an approximate reflection of the ratio of the sexes in the general population – on the bench is an important contributor to legitimacy of international criminal courts. First, it proposes that sex representation affects normative legitimacy because men and women bring different perspectives to judging. Consequently, without both sexes, adjudication is inherently biased. Second, even if one rejects the proposition that men and women "think differently", sex representation affects sociological legitimacy because sex representation signals an impartial bench and capacity to do justice to constituencies involved in the shaping of international criminal adjudication. The article concludes by raising questions for further study.

Failure to Carry the Burden of Proof: How Joint Criminal Enterprise Lost its Way at the Special Court for Sierra Leone

This article contends that a flawed interpretation of joint criminal enterprise (JCE) embraced by the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) has set a dangerous precedent for international criminal adjudication. Breaking from a trend towards more careful application of the liability doctrine at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a series of JCE decisions from the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, Revolutionary United Front, and Charles Taylor cases betray profound doctrinal confusion and overreaching at the Special Court. The problem began with indictments that failed to satisfy the pleading requirements for a common criminal purpose at the core of each alleged JCE. Since this defect in the JCE pleadings has not been recognized as such by the SCSL Appeals Chamber, the Court has struggled to properly assess the individual liability of each accused, with negative consequences for the clarity and correctness of the JCE jurisprudence. Most recently, in Sesay, Kallon and Gbao, Majorities in the Trial and Appeals Chambers entered and upheld convictions based on an interpretation of ‘common purpose’ so flawed that it detached the basic and extended forms of JCE from the core mens rea that defines them, thereby expanding the doctrine from a legitimate liability theory into a vehicle for guilt by association. This article offers a critical assessment of the SCSL’s JCE jurisprudence to date, framing the Court’s experience as a concrete cautionary tale of the doctrine misapplied. JCE fails to be a useful tool for assessing individual liability, unless its basic elements are clearly pled in the indictment and rigorously applied by judges. The authors recommend that future international criminal proceedings abandon the SCSL’s misconceived approach, and instead take care to adhere to the procedural safeguards articulated in recent ICTY jurisprudence - ensuring that the JCE is pled with an unambiguously criminal common purpose, and that the trier of fact strictly construes each legal element of the doctrine in accordance with the culpability principle, the principle of legality and the fair trial rights of the accused.

Göran Sluiter, International Criminal Adjudication and the Collection of Evidence: Obligations of States (Antwerp, Oxford and New York: Intersentia, 2002) xix + 444 pp. €69 (paperback)

Göran Sluiter, International Criminal Adjudication and the Collection of Evidence: Obligations of States (Antwerp, Oxford and New York: Intersentia, 2002) xix + 444 pp. €69 (paperback)

International Criminal Courts as Fact (and Truth) Finders in Post-Conflict Societies: Can Disparities with Ordinary International Courts be Avoided?

I want to make three points in connection with David's lecture, looking at his subject from my own perspective, i.e., that of a judge in an international criminal tribunal. First, I want to consider the specific function of international criminal courts and tribunals as finders. Secondly, I will examine how international criminal courts fit into David's theoretical picture of top-down versus bottom-up judicial bodies. Thirdly, I wish to convey some of my concerns arising from the multiplication of proceedings (criminal and civil) arising from the same facts before different international courts and tribunals. International Criminal Courts as Truth Finders A new feature of the international legal order in the past few decades has undoubtedly been the reemergence of international criminal courts, with the ad hoc criminal tribunals of the United Nations (the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)), the regional mixed international tribunals (Sierra Leone, Cambodia, East Timor), and the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC). The driving impulses behind the creation of these institutions may, as David mentioned in his lecture, differ from those behind the classical international courts and tribunals. One of the functions of international criminal law courts is that of providing a historical account and achieving reconciliation of post-conflict societies that have gone through a painful episode of mass atrocities. This is something which they share with another newcomer in the international legal order, and reconciliation commissions (TRCs), which in part originate from the same generating impulses. The latter may even be complementary to international criminal adjudication, as Tom suggested in his Holocaust memorial lecture, wondering whether the post-World War II criminal proceedings in Nuremberg should not have been complemented by a commission that could have examined the greater patterns of the historical behind the holocaust. (1) According to some, international criminal courts have, as far as finding process is concerned, little to add to the truth as it is revealed by journalists or historians, who base themselves on largely the same sources. I beg to disagree with that view. The finding process before criminal courts is of a different qualitative nature, because it is obtained through the specific rules of evidence that apply in criminal proceedings, above all the presumption of innocence and the prosecutorial burden of proof. What has been established by a criminal court following a correct procedure can therefore be said to be more credible in terms of its truthfulness than the produced by journalism or history writing. For example, for those who would wish to deny the Srebrenica massacre, it may have been easier to do so when only journalistic and historical accounts of the 1995 event were available than it is today after the judgments of the ICTY in which two panels of judges (first the Trial Chamber and thereafter the Appeals Chamber) found the facts to be established. This function of finding, and the contribution to history writing that results from this, may be one of the core missions for international criminal courts. In post conflict societies, different versions of the traumatic events often compete with each other. (2) It is extremely difficult for national courts in a post conflict society to make an unbiased assessment of these different versions, especially shortly after the events. This assessment is, however, a crucial factor in the process of transition. Without it, post conflict societies will have little more than annals of these traumatic events, produced by journalists and historians. (3) Through the process of judicial fact finding, international criminal courts help to sort out competing accounts of traumatic events in a conflict situation and to determine the account that will count as the official history that society. …

'The Milosevic Trial -- Live!': An Iconical Analysis of International Law's Claim of Legitimate Authority

It has been argued that international law has recently "come of age", that it is a fully-fledged legal system like any other. It has also been argued that in order for a normative system to qualify as "law" it must, at the least, claim to possess legitimate authority and to be supreme to other normative systems. This article examines one highly visible development in international law - the criminal war trials - from a sociological perspective, trying to discern whether and how international law claims legitimate authority and supremacy. Specifically, it focuses on a deeply symbolic example of international criminal adjudication: the Milosevic trial. The article offers a sociological reading of the symbolism of the interpersonal dynamics of the Milosevic trial and concludes that what is in fact attempted, and perhaps achieved, through internationalizing the transitional-justice trials is the internationalization of the transition process itself. The subject of the transition from an illiberal and illegitimate regime to a liberal and legitimate one is not in fact the former-Yugoslavia, but the 'international community' itself. The rule of law that the ICTY seeks to vindicate is not only law as such, and not necessarily the law of the former-Yugoslavia, but the rule of international law.

I Book Review: International Criminal Adjudication and the Collection of Evidence: Obligations of States

I Book Review: International Criminal Adjudication and the Collection of Evidence: Obligations of States