scholarly journals Mapping the Shift: Human Rights and Criminal Law

2018 ◽  
Vol 112 ◽  
pp. 84-85
Author(s):  
Karen Engle
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Think Tank ◽  
Policy Studies ◽  
Formerly Incarcerated ◽  
International Award ◽  
Convicted Felons

In 2015, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)—a progressive think tank on U.S. domestic and foreign policy—awarded its annual human rights awards to two criminal lawyers. The domestic award went to Daryl Atkinson, who advocates for the rights of convicted felons. Its international award went to Almudena Bernabeu, for what the IPS called her “successful prosecution of several of the worst Latin American perpetrators of crimes against humanity.” I do not think that the IPS was trying to be balanced by picking a lawyer working on behalf of the rights of the formerly incarcerated, on one hand, and a prosecutor, on the other. Rather, the organization sought to honor those it sees as promoting human rights. In the context of U.S. law, that means fighting for the rights of defendants and the convicted. For international law, it means the opposite.

The Puzzle of Atrocity Criminalization

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Mark S. Berlin
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Qualitative Case Studies ◽  
National Courts ◽  
Domestic Courts ◽  
Quantitative Analyses

Why do governments take atrocity offenses, like genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, from international law and legislate them into domestic criminal law, empowering national courts to prosecute their own, and sometimes other states’, government and military officials? The question is important, because the international community has constructed an international legal regime to prosecute the most serious human rights violations, but that regime is designed to rely primarily on domestic criminal courts to try offenders. To fulfill this role, domestic courts often require specific legislation that defines and criminalizes these offenses in national law. Yet, the adoption of national atrocity laws is puzzling, since in a number of ways, these laws appear to threaten states’ interests. This introductory chapter highlights the puzzle of atrocity criminalization and discusses its importance for the functioning of the international atrocity regime. It then situates this study in existing literatures and highlights the book’s contributions to research on atrocity justice, human rights, and international law. Next, it summarizes the book’s main arguments and details the study’s multi-method research design, which combines quantitative analyses of new, original datasets with in-depth qualitative case studies of Guatemala, Colombia, Poland, and the Maldives.

Conceptualising Disappearances in International Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-62
Author(s):  
Barbara A. Frey
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Democracies ◽  
Legal Accountability ◽  
International Human

Enforced disappearance is one of the most serious crimes, prohibited across several regimes of international law, including human rights, humanitarian law and criminal law, yet Latin American governments and officials frequently avoid legal accountability for these violations. The dynamics of disappearances in post-transitional democracies call for a reconceptualisation of the international human rights framework, by reconsidering the meaning of state acquiescence. This chapter argues that a relevant and effective framework must embrace a contextual analysis and foreground the positive obligations of states to search and investigate these crimes, using generally accepted principles found in due diligence jurisprudence to measure the legal adequacy of the state’s responses to reported disappearances. Stretching the legal framework is necessary to disrupt the benefits of impunity, which violate the rights of victims, allow disappearances to thrive, and harm societies by hiding the truth.

scholarly journals THE EXPANDING PROTECTION OF MEMBERS OF A PARTY'S OWN ARMED FORCES UNDER INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (04) ◽  
pp. 943-976
Author(s):  
Cóman Kenny ◽  
Yvonne McDermott
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Human Rights Law

AbstractDoes international law govern how States and armed groups treat their own forces? Do serious violations of the laws of war and human rights law that would otherwise constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity fall squarely outside the scope of international criminal law when committed against fellow members of the same armed forces? Orthodoxy considered that such forces were protected only under relevant domestic criminal law and/or human rights law. However, landmark decisions issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) suggest that crimes committed against members of the same armed forces are not automatically excluded from the scope of international criminal law. This article argues that, while there are some anomalies and gaps in the reasoning of both courts, there is a common overarching approach under which crimes by a member of an armed group against a person from the same forces can be prosecuted under international law. Starting from an assessment of the specific situation of the victim, this article conducts an in-depth analysis of the concepts of ‘hors de combat’ and ‘allegiance’ for war crimes and that of the ‘lawful target’ for crimes against humanity, providing an interpretative framework for the future prosecution of such crimes.

Legal Traditions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Intercultural Professional Communication

2011 ◽  
pp. 216-246
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
International Law ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Universal Declaration ◽  
Professional Communication ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Global Communications

This chapter examines the relations between rhetoric and law across cultures, grounding the discussion in U.S. common law, Latin American Civil law, and Asian law. It also explores the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a model of developing “international” or “universal” approaches to law and human rights. It concludes by discussing recent events of international law involving intellectual property and global communications.

International Criminal Justice History Writing as Anachronism

2019 ◽  
pp. 72-89
Author(s):  
Frédéric Mégret
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Individual Accountability

This chapter focuses on the extent to which the contemporary project of international criminal justice cannot easily lay claim to what it imagines to be its past, because that past, despite superficial similarities, often exhibited fundamentally different concerns. It highlights three areas in which international criminal justice today is arguably dramatically different from how it was understood up to the 1990s. First, international criminal justice was for a long time much less obsessed with the criminalization of international law prohibitions specifically, and much more interested in the transnational dimensions of the criminal law. Second, it was much less committed to a strict model of individual accountability under international law and much more willing to see the state as the central pivot of international criminal responsibility. Third, it was intimately linked to peace projects whereas it has become intimately associated to the fight against atrocities and mass human rights violations.

1. Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ormerod ◽  
Karl Laird
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Human Rights Act ◽  
Human Rights Act 1998

This introductory chapter examines the functions of criminal law and discusses the sources of criminal law. These include common law and statutes, EU and international law, and the Human Rights Act 1998. It also considers the principle of fair labelling in criminal law and the codification of criminal law.

2 Crimes Against Humanity Under General International Law

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mettraux Guénaël
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Core Values ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
International Crimes ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses crimes against humanity under international law. Crimes against humanity were first introduced at Nuremberg as a means of criminalizing three sorts of criminality that so far had evaded the sanction of international law: atrocities committed outside the context of an armed conflict or independent of it; crimes committed against fellow nationals or nationals of allied nations; and institutionalized discriminatory violence that resulted in individuals being targeted and mistreated by a state because of their identity. Crimes against humanity seek to protect core attributes of all human beings: their dignity; their humanity; and their fundamental human rights. The notion of crimes against humanity reflects the fact that the protection of those interests and the punishment of serious violations of these interests is a matter of universal concern. It also makes it clear that the protection arising from international law does not depend on the nationality of the victim or his membership in a group, nor on his or relationship to the perpetrator. Instead, it is the sheer humanity of the victim that warrants and justifies the criminalization of such acts. And whilst the notion of genocide and crimes against humanity overlap in part in their efforts to protect these core values, unlike genocide, crimes against humanity seek to protect individuals as such, rather than groups of individuals. The chapter then looks at the relationship between crimes against humanity and other international crimes as well as the process of defining crimes against humanity.

Crimes against Humanity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth van Schaack
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Crime ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Civilian Population

Crimes against humanity have both a colloquial and a legal existence. In daily parlance, the term is employed to condemn any number of atrocities that violate international human rights. As a legal construct, crimes against humanity encompass a constellation of acts made criminal under international law when they are committed within the context of a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population. In the domain of international criminal law, crimes against humanity are an increasingly useful component of any international prosecutor’s toolbox, because they can be charged in connection with acts of violence that do not implicate other international criminal prohibitions, such as the prohibitions against war crimes (which require a nexus to an armed conflict) and genocide (which protects only certain human groups and requires proof of a specific intent to destroy such a group). Although the concept of crimes against humanity has deep roots, crimes against humanity were first adjudicated—albeit with some controversy—in the criminal proceedings following the World War II period. The central challenge to defining crimes against humanity under international criminal law since then has been to come up with a formulation of the offense that reconciles the principle of sovereignty—which envisions an exclusive territorial domain in which states are free from outside scrutiny—with the idea that international law can, and indeed should, regulate certain acts committed entirely within the borders of a single state. Because many enumerated crimes against humanity are also crimes under domestic law (e.g., murder, assault, and rape), it was necessary to define crimes against humanity in a way that did not elevate every domestic crime to the status of an international crime, subject to international jurisdiction. Over the years, legal drafters have experimented with various elements in an effort to arrive at a workable penal definition. The definitional confusion plaguing the crime over its life span generated a considerable amount of legal scholarship. It was not until the UN Security Council promulgated the statutes of the two ad hoc international criminal tribunals—the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda—that a modern definition of the crime emerged. These definitions were further refined by the case law of the two tribunals and their progeny, such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone. All these doctrinal developments were codified, with some additional modifications, in a consensus definition in Article 7 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). It is now clear that the offense constitutes three essential elements: (1) the existence of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population and (2) the intentional commission of an enumerated act (such as an act of murder or torture) (3) by an individual with knowledge that his or her act would contribute to the larger attack. A renewed effort is now afoot to promulgate a multilateral treaty devoted to crimes against humanity based on the ICC definition and these central elements. Through this dynamic process of codification and interpretation, many—but not all—definitional issues left open in the postwar period have finally been resolved. Although their origins were somewhat shaky, crimes against humanity now have a firm place in the canon of international criminal law.

scholarly journals State Practice as Element of Customary International Law: A White Knight in International Criminal Law?

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 784-804
Author(s):  
Harmen van der Wilt
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Case Law ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
International Criminal Tribunals ◽  
Domestic Courts ◽  
State Practice

Inter-state practice is relatively scarce in the area of human rights and international criminal law. This article ventures to inquire how this has affected the process of identification of customary international law by international criminal tribunals and courts. The main conclusion is that the two components of customary international law – opinio juris and state practice – have become blurred. In search of customary international law, international tribunals have resorted to national legislation and case law of domestic courts. These legal artefacts can be qualified as both evidence of state practice and opinio juris. The author attempts to explain the reasons for this development and holds that, if properly applied, the methodology, while seemingly messy, comports with the nature of international criminal law.

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