Justice Beyond The Hague

Council Special Report No. June David A. Kaye. Justice Beyond The Hague. Supporting the Prosecution of International Crimes in National Courts.
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We know that we are not alone. We believe that thousands of people will join this march, for one day, for one week, for one month. Together we will walk.

HLS in the World

We will walk in peace. We will walk for those who were not lucky enough to be born in Berlin, London or Paris.


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We will start on 26th December from Berlin yes, it is very soon, but very soon it will be too late. Our estimates are that it will be of us on the first day in Berlin but the numbers are dynamic and it is hard to predict how many of us will show up. We want to gather more people on the way and gain the attention of the whole world — for peace in Aleppo.

For better understanding of our idea, please watch this short video: There are already many, many people involved all over Europe but we still need a lot of support from lawyers, doctors, the media in all of the countries on the way. For more details you can contact us civilmarchforaleppo gmail. This march is what we can do about the situation in Syria right here and right now. Beyond the Hague is excited to welcome Dr. The SCC also excluded the applicability of joint criminal enterprise III, finding that at the time the crimes were committed criminal liability based on making a contribution to the implementation of a common criminal purpose was limited to crimes that were actually encompassed by the common purpose.

This blog post seeks to provide a brief overview of the background to this judgment and some comments on its findings. The case originally involved four accused. However, Ieng Thirith , the former Minister of Social Affairs during the Khmer Rouge, was found unfit to stand trial in November , while the case against her husband Ieng Sary , the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, was similarly dropped on 14th March following his death the same day.

These incidents brought into sharp relief the risks associated with pursuing justice for crimes perpetrated over forty years ago, and a decision was made to sever the substantial case against the remaining defendants into a series of sub-trials. The initial Trial Judgment was released on the 7 th of August The Chamber found that this common purpose was implemented through policies to forcibly displace people from cities and towns and between rural areas, and a policy to target former Khmer Republic officials.

Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were thus found to have committed the crimes against humanity of murder, political persecution and other inhumane acts comprising forced transfer, enforced disappearances and attacks on human dignity during the movements of the population, and murder and extermination through executions of Khmer Republic officials.

This judgment was not without its critics. As a result, despite finding that there was evidence of Khmer Republic officials being murdered, it was found that the liability of the accused had not been proven, and the convictions were reversed. Discover more publications, questions and projects in Justice. The consideration of rape as torture and as genocide: Some implications for group theory. The trend of recurrence rape in our society today constitutes a serious phenomenal threat to the human existence and dignity. This paper also examined selected statutes which prohibit rape.

It further examined rape in the War rape comes in many forms, is perpetrated for many reasons, has multiple victims and multiple culpable perpetrators. This chapter examines war rape, asks whether Just War Theory JWT can tackle the specific challenges posed by the reality of sexual violence during wartime, and suggests that it might actually have an important conceptual framework to offer to philosophical analyses of the Gender, sexualized violence, and the prevention of genocide.

In the past two decades, sexualized violence during conflict has gained the attention of international judicial bodies, policymakers, and international organizations. Electoral changes on both sides of the Atlantic brought in political leaders less supportive of these courts. The Bush administration's unilateralist policies were hostile to international institutions. The election of several new governments in Europe reduced the willingness of the European Union to stand up to such hostility.

The attacks of September 11, further contributed to a shift away from support for international justice, with efforts to combat terrorism taking precedence over international law. In May , the Bush administration launched a worldwide campaign to undermine and marginalize the ICC. After repudiating the U. The Bush administration also played hardball to pressure individual ICC states parties to sign bilateral immunity agreements exempting U.


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    6. These agreements put states parties in violation of their treaty obligations to the court. Washington's efforts to undermine the ICC coincided with a rising level of disenchantment among some powerful Security Council members towards the ad hoc tribunals it had created due to their cost and slow-moving procedures. As entirely new entities with only the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals as institutional precedents, the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, not surprisingly, had their share of difficulties.

    With Security Council members increasingly skeptical of the utility of the tribunals and concerned with rising costs, political and financial support waned. This culminated in pressure to adopt a "completion strategy" with a deadline regardless of whether this date allows the tribunals to fulfill their mandates. Imposing increased political and financial constraints, the U.

    Justice Beyond The Hague Tribunal :: Balkan Insight

    Security Council then made efforts to bring international expertise to bear on questions of justice in ways that were less politically controversial and costly. These factors prompted the emergence of a diverse "second generation" of international criminal justice mechanisms: International Commission of Inquiry on East Timor recommended that an international tribunal be created to try those responsible for atrocities committed by the Indonesian army and Timorese militias backed by Indonesia at the time of the vote for independence in However, Indonesia promised to prosecute individuals responsible for these crimes.

    To try alleged perpetrators who remained in East Timor, the U. Even after East Timorese independence on May 20, , panels comprised of one East Timorese and two international judges, known as the Special Panels for Serious Crimes, adjudicate these cases. Mission in Kosovo took a similar approach to try serious crimes committed during the armed conflict in The ICTY lacked the resources and the mandate to act as the main venue to bring justice for these crimes.

    Although a justice system was reestablished in Kosovo following the conflict, underfunding, poor organization, and political manipulation plagued the newly ethnic-Albanian-dominated system. They generally adjudicate cases involving serious crimes committed during the conflict. As discussed in the following section, the hybrid mechanisms in East Timor and Kosovo have faced serious difficulties in administering justice in such cases.

    In , taking a different "hybrid" approach, the United Nations signed an agreement with the government of Sierra Leone to create the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

    Justice Beyond The Hague Tribunal

    The Special Court was mandated to bring to justice those "most responsible" for atrocities committed during the country's internal armed conflict. Like the two ad hoc international tribunals, the Special Court has its own statute and rules of procedure. It does not operate as part of the national courts of Sierra Leone.

    Unlike the Rwandan and Yugoslav tribunals, the court is situated in Sierra Leone, has jurisdiction over some crimes under Sierra Leonean law, and has judicial panels composed of international and Sierra Leonean judges. The court is expected to try between fifteen and twenty alleged perpetrators of the horrific crimes of the conflict. Due to Herculean efforts by the staff of the Registry and Office of the Prosecutor, the Special Court was established in war-ravaged Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the space of a few months in and To date, the prosecutor has issued nine indictments.

    While the Special Court aroused great expectations, including strong support from the United States due to its low cost and enhanced national character, it too has encountered disenchantment among some Security Council members and the U. These attitudes congealed as the cost of the court's operations began to rise beyond initial budget projections.

    The reservations took a qualitative leap when the prosecutor unsealed an indictment against former Liberian President Charles Taylor while the latter was attending peace talks in Ghana in June The appropriateness of unsealing the indictment during peace talks generated considerable objections, although no one denies that Taylor's long awaited departure took place soon thereafter.

    At this writing, the Special Court was facing serious budgetary problems due to the voluntary nature of its financial support. In Cambodia, efforts to create a stand-alone "hybrid" court to bring members of the Khmer Rouge to justice have been less successful. The United States, France, Japan, and others pressured the United Nations to conclude an agreement with Cambodia to establish a Khmer Rouge Tribunal that lacked fundamental protections to ensure that the tribunal would be independent and impartial.

    The proposed tribunal would have a majority of Cambodian judges and a minority of international judges, working alongside Cambodian and international co-prosecutors. Cambodia's judiciary has been widely condemned by the United Nations and many of its member states for lack of independence, low levels of competence, and corruption. There are serious concerns about this mechanism. There are other post-conflict situations where the permanent members of the Security Council have yet to address impunity.

    In Afghanistan, a national human rights commission, rather than an international commission of inquiry, was given the task of addressing past abuses committed during two decades of war despite its very limited capacity. This was largely due to resistance by the newly established Afghan government, the U. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan to a serious accountability process that might upset the political transition. To date, the national human rights commission has not made meaningful progress to address past crimes, a result of inadequate training, resources, and equipment, and threats against commission members.

    The accountability process in Iraq marks another missed opportunity for the international community. The United States has backed such an "Iraqi-led" tribunal to try these crimes and many Iraqis have expressed support for this approach.

    Beyond the Hague: The Challenges of International Justice

    However, Iraqi jurists have not had experience in complex criminal trials applying international standards. In the face of very limited United Nations involvement in post-war Iraq, the Security Council, for its part, even shied away from a proposal to establish an expert group comprised of Iraqi and international experts to assess how to best bring justice for Iraq. There is real concern that the projected trials in Baghdad could end up as highly politicized proceedings, undercutting the fairness and legitimacy of the process.

    In the last several years, although some states continued to meet their obligation to prosecute the most serious international crimes through their national courts, the application of universal jurisdiction laws also has been scaled back somewhat. While there are a number of pending cases involving mid-level officials before national courts in Europe, there has been no increase in prosecutions of senior officials.

    In the so-called Yerodia case of February , the International Court of Justice ICJ held that a sitting foreign minister was immune from prosecution in another country's court system regardless of the seriousness of the crimes with which he was charged. Although the ICJ noted that such officials would not be immune to prosecution before international criminal courts where these courts have jurisdiction, its decision went against recent trends to deny immunity for serious human rights crimes.

    In , Belgium was forced to revise its universal jurisdiction law in response to intense economic and diplomatic threats by the Bush administration. This included the Bush administration raising the possibility of moving NATO headquarters elsewhere unless Belgium capitulated to its demands. The Belgian law had a particularly expansive reach: This attracted enormous media attention and opposition even though the investigative judge had the power to, and undoubtedly would have, ultimately dismissed patently unfounded complaints.

    The revised law restricts the reach of universal jurisdiction to cases where either the accused or victim has ties to Belgium, making it similar to or more restrictive than the laws of most countries that recognize universal jurisdiction. A Way Forward The backlash against the developing international justice system, while dismaying, is hardly surprising given the extent to which the significant advances of the past decade have begun to constrain the prerogatives of abusive state officials.

    The challenge now is to work effectively in a more difficult international environment while many national courts remain unable and unwilling to prosecute the most serious human rights crimes. The gains engendered by international justice institutions need to be preserved and the international system strengthened until many more national courts assume their front-line role in combating impunity.

    We see three critical steps: This essay concludes with separate descriptions of each of these steps, including specific recommendations on how to implement them to maximize the effectiveness of existing institutions. Assessing the Challenges Facing International Justice Today The system of international justice has made several singular advances.

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    At the same time, as decribed below, the ad hoc international tribunals have not been as effective or as efficient as envisioned. The achievements of the courts in Kosovo and East Timor have been similarly mixed. Grasping the combination of the inherent institutional limitations and the objective difficulties to international justice is crucial in evaluating the performance of these tribunals and continuing efforts to more fully assure justice for atrocities.

    Prosecuting senior officials for serious human rights crimes where there are a large number of victims is a complex and expensive process regardless of whether the cases are tried before national or international courts.