scholarly journals A Sophisticated Beast? On the Construction of an ‘Ideal’ Perpetrator in the Opening Statements of International Criminal Trials

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 677-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofia Stolk
Keyword(s):  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Opening Statements ◽  
International Criminal Trials

‘The Record on Which History Will Judge Us Tomorrow’: Auto-History in the Opening Statements of International Criminal Trials

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 993-1012 ◽  
Author(s):  
SOFIA STOLK
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
The Past ◽  
International Military Tribunal ◽  
Military Tribunal ◽  
Opening Statements ◽  
International Criminal Trials

AbstractIn international criminal tribunal discourse, appeals to history and legitimacy are omnipresent. This article addresses the widespread practice of combining these appeals into one narrative. It analyses how international prosecutors engage with justifying the legitimacy of trials through the invocation of a tribunal's own history. The scrutiny of such ‘auto-histories’ as a specific form of history-telling illuminates an overlooked dimension of trials as fora for writing history. The opening statement is a perfect opportunity for constructing and communicating auto-histories. A comparative study of opening statements at the International Military Tribunal, the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court reveals a recurrent, self-justifying narrative where both rootedness in history and a break with the past are key to singing the tribunal into existence as a crucial mechanism in the transition from chaos to peace. The connections between auto-histories at different tribunals show how legal practitioners discursively contribute to constructing the international criminal law's identity by relying on both origins and future.

scholarly journals Trial and (Potential) Error: Conflicting Visions on Reparations Within the ICC System

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina Balta ◽  
Manon Bax ◽  
Rianne Letschert
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
International Criminal Court ◽  
Rome Statute ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Conflict Situations ◽  
International Criminal Trials

Twenty years ago, the International Criminal Court (hereinafter ICC or the Court) was established holding the aim of placing victims at the heart of international criminal justice proceedings and delivering justice to them through, among others, reparations. Article 75 of the Rome Statute lays out the reparations regime, and, in practice, court-ordered reparations are a means of delivering such justice. Focusing on Court decisions on reparations, our analysis takes stock of all developments before the ICC and attempts to highlight the mismatch between characteristics inherent to the objectives of international criminal trials such as providing accountability and punishment of the accused and delivering justice for victims of mass crimes—the so-called procedural challenges. We also submit that the Court is facing conceptual challenges, related to an apparent misunderstanding of the various concepts at stake: reparations as such and the various modalities and channels of enforcing them. We conclude that although the ICC’s reparation regime may not be the best reparative response to provide justice to victims in conflict situations affected by mass victimization, we suggest that improving the ICC’s approach includes, at a minimum, tackling these challenges.

s.VII Anxieties, Ch.28 Hangman’s Perspective: Three Genres of Critique following Eichmann

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mann Itamar
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Political Community ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Adolf Eichmann ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
International Criminal Trials

This chapter takes Adolf Eichmann as an object of study in subjecting international criminal trials to three types of critique. First, adopting the perspective of the rule of law, this chapter engages with Hannah Arendt’s writing on the Eichmann trial to argue that international criminal trials are constantly suspected of becoming ‘show trials’. Second, turning to Shoshana Felman’s work, the chapter identifies a genre of critique according to which international criminal justice is premised on an experience of catharsis, in which the trauma of atrocity’s victims is alleviated (constituting a post-atrocity political community). Finally, this chapter analyzes a 2010 film that reveals the trauma of the man who executed Eichmann, to show the unacknowledged risks of wielding the violence of criminal justice. Based on this ‘hangman’s perspective’, the chapter suggests assessing international criminal trials in light of questions about the transnational allocation of such risks and about preexisting inequalities—economic, ethnic, and other—that determine the roles different people will end up playing in trials.

scholarly journals Expressing what? The stigmatization of the defendant and the ICC’s institutional interests in the Ongwen case

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Liana Georgieva Minkova
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Operation Risk ◽  
International Criminal Trials ◽  
Empirical Contribution ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract The potential of international criminal trials to express the wrongfulness of mass atrocities and instil norms of appropriate behaviour within communities has been subject to a lively theoretical debate. This article makes an important empirical contribution by examining the limitations to the expressivist aspiration of international criminal justice in the context of the message communicated by the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor (ICC-OTP) in the Ongwen case. A detailed analysis of the selection of charges, modes of liability, and the overall presentation of the Prosecutor’s arguments at trial suggests that the ICC-OTP’s limited capabilities to apprehend suspects and its dependency on state co-operation risk the excessive stigmatization of the few defendants available for trial for the purpose of demonstrating the Court’s capability of prosecuting notorious criminals. As the only apprehended commander from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Dominic Ongwen has been presented by the ICC-OTP as the ‘cause’ of crimes committed in Northern Uganda without due regard for the degree of his alleged involvement in those crimes compared to other LRA commanders, the role of other actors in the conflict, or the significance of his own victimization as a child. Ongwen’s excessive stigmatization expressed the importance of the Ugandan investigation after a decade of showing no results. Yet, it also produced a simplistic narrative which failed to express the complexity of violence in Northern Uganda.

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