In association with the International Commission of Jurists

December 2020

18 Dec

[Priya Urs is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Laws, University College London, where her doctoral research addresses the application of the gravity criterion for admissibility at the International Criminal Court. (priya.urs.17@ucl.ac.uk)] Carsten Stahn’s Justice as Message introduces and examines the myriad manifestations of expression in the field of international criminal justice. The contribution of the book is its ambitious inquiry into the use of expressivism as a...

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17 Dec

By Laura Knöpfel (Senior Research Fellow Transnational Law Institute, Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London) and Carlos López (Senior Legal Adviser, International Commission of Jurists) On 29th November 2020, Switzerland narrowly rejected the popular Responsible Business Initiative (RBI) which would have obliged Swiss companies and the businesses they control anywhere in the world to respect human rights and environmental standards and introduced civil...

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17 Dec

[Marina Aksenova is a Professor of international and comparative criminal law at IE University, Madrid, email: marina.aksenova@ie.edu.] I enjoyed reading Carsten Stahn’s Justice as Message (OUP, 2020). The work presents a carefully weaved tapestry of ideas surrounding the concept of expressivism in international criminal law. The book is undertaking an impressive task of bridging a normative gap between the ambition of international criminal law and its reality...

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16 Dec

[Darryl Robinson is an Associate Professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law (Canada), specializing in international criminal justice.]  Carsten Stahn’s Justice as Message is a singularly impressive work.  Carsten weaves together ideas from several bodies of literature, in a manner that is breathtaking in its depth, breadth and sensitivity.  Over the last 25 years, scholarship on international criminal law (ICL) has been greatly enriched.  In earlier, lonelier days...

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15 Dec

[Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and Director, Transnational Law Institute, Washington and Lee University.] Carsten Stahn, in the very first line of his terrifically impressive book, invokes a jingle from The Police. When I was teenage boy, I loved the Police. I greatly fancied Sting, his confidence and his presence, and how in his songs he tapped into the churn and...

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14 Dec

[Diane Marie Amann is the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at the University of Georgia School of Law.] The eye cannot help but be drawn to the cover of Justice as Message, the new analysis by Carsten Stahn of, to quote the subtitle, Expressivist Foundations of International Criminal Justice. On the high-gloss paper jacket...

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14 Dec

[Carsten Stahn is a Professor of International Criminal Law and Global Justice at Leiden Law School, Programme Director of the Grotius Centre (The Hague) and author of Justice as Message: Expressivist Foundations of International Law.] Blogs play an essential role in discussing scholarship. With more books being published each year, it is difficult for a general readership to keep track of publications...

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14 Dec

This week, we are happy to host an insightful discussion on Carsten Stahn's latest book, Justice as Message: Expressivist Foundations of International Criminal Justice, published by Oxford University Press. From the publisher: International criminal justice relies on messages, speech acts, and performative practices in order to convey social meaning. Major criminal proceedings, such as Nuremberg, Tokyo, and other post-World War II...

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13 Dec

Events BIICL Webinar Series: Teaching International Law: The British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) is convening a webinar series on ‘Teaching International Law’ on 8 January - 23 April 2021. The practice of teaching international law is conducted in a wide range of contexts across the world by a host of different actors. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that reflections and collaborations...

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12 Dec

[Gunnar M. Ekeløve-Slydal is the Acting Secretary General of The Norwegian Helsinki Committee.] Ensuring individual integrity in international justice may at times have been perceived as a concern that can be accommodated by mere declarations and codes of conduct and compliance procedures. Not so anymore. I believe there has been a recognition that integrity is both a legally binding term within international courts, as well as a...

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12 Dec

In my previous post, which was quite critical of the OTP's decision not to seek authorization to investigate British war crimes in Iraq, I made two central points. The first was that, pursuant to the Afghanistan appeals judgment, the OTP would not have needed to present the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) with information concerning complementarity and the PTC would not have...

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11 Dec

[Andreas Schueller is the Director of the International Crimes and Accountability Program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.] On 9 December 2020, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague announced its decision to close the preliminary examination into alleged war crimes by British troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2009. The OTP explained...

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