International Criminal Justice and the Protection of Human Rights: The Rule of Law or the Hubris of Law?

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Silk
Author(s):  
Mann Itamar

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Theodor Meron

This chapter provides a brief biography of the author and his road to Judgeship. Being a Judge allowed him to put into practice his commitment to accountability, rule of law and due process. The chapter then sketches out the contours of international criminal justice. International criminal courts, in many ways, resemble criminal courts in national jurisdictions around the world. They weigh evidence, follow due process, ensure the parties are heard and apply and abide by the law and respect human rights. At the same time, international criminal courts—and the cases they hear—are extraordinary. Because of their unique role and the nature of the crimes charged, international criminal courts are also often seen as something more than criminal courts. Their judgements are sometimes expected to be definitive histories of the conflict.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Onischenko N.

The current state of Ukrainian society requires the scientific community to find answers to the general social impulses needed for reform strategies: from unconstructive attempts to replace the state with civil society to efforts aimed at their balanced interaction. It is the principle of social and political balance in the relationship between the rule of law and civil society should be the basis for correcting and correcting the unstable economic situation, overcoming acute social conflicts, establishing the rule of law, building a democratic state. It should be noted that it is quite clear that sometimes the implementation of a right requires at least not one, but clearly several opportunities, such as: economic, educational, social, gender, etc., existing in the relevant spatio-temporal continuum. Moreover, there is an indisputable thesis that there are no secondary or non-first-class or type of human rights, so every unrealized, not realized in time or not fully realized right, without a doubt, is based on the lack of, first of all, the corresponding real opportunities. It is also clear that the implementation of a certain right depends, for example, on the relevant regulations. we note that state-building processes, their dynamics, progressive trends depend on many factors. In this context, the interconnectedness of the development of a democratic, legal, social, European state and the formation of a mature, active, civil society was considered. Keywords: legal science, legal doctrine, human rights, rights and opportunities, legal development.


Author(s):  
Kjersti Lohne

A sociology of punishment for international criminal justice enables attention to the norms, morals, and values at play in the motivational dynamics of penal reforms. At the same time, these cultural forces must be analysed against the background of social organization and structure, indeed, as to what enables people to think and feel in certain ways and to promote policies in accordance with their sensibilities. As such, this chapter explores international criminal justice as a field replete with cosmopolitan sensibilities, but also of lifestyles, qualifications, and restraints. Finding that international criminal justice is perceived as a cosmopolitan expression of social justice, the first part conceptualizes human rights NGOs working in international criminal justice as global moral entrepreneurs and shows how they use humanist discourses to promote global justice-making through law, turning them into advocates of international criminal justice. Balancing claims to authority in the field, the NGOs have to navigate between being ‘insiders’ as experts and ‘outsiders’ that can claim moral authority. The analysis draws on scholarship inspired by Bourdieu and is put to work on transnational fields, enabling attention to what is often downplayed in studies of international law, namely class. As such, the chapter inquires into whose imaginations of global justice become part of its materiality, finding that advocates of humanity predominantly belong to a class of transnational western professionals.


Author(s):  
Frédéric Mégret

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.


Author(s):  
Tomuschat Christian

This article examines the role of the rule of law and democracy in international human rights law. It discusses the legal nature and the formal recognition of the rule of law and democracy. It explains that that rule of law and democracy are elements that constitute essential pillars promoting real enjoyment of human rights but they are dependent on the general conditions prevailing within society. This article highlights the importance of the supervisory roles of international bodies in ensuring the effectiveness of the guarantees set forth in international instruments for the protection of human rights.


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