To date, ‘A new International Human Rights Court for West Africa: The ECOWAS Community Court of Justice’ authored by Karen Alter, Larry Helfer and Jacqueline McAllister is arguably the most eloquent scholarly exposition on the human rights jurisdiction of the ECOWAS Court of Justice (ECCJ) by observers from outside the African continent. This brilliant piece of work is to my knowledge, also the only one yet in existence to have taken a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of the ECCJ. Based on their very thorough and painstaking empirical investigation, the authors have successfully (in my view) supplied answers to some of the nagging questions that political scientists and lawyers would have regarding the budding human rights mandate of the ECCJ. As they point out in their opening remarks, intrigued (as the rest of us are) by the sharp but successful redeployment of the ECCJ from its original objectives of providing support economic integration to a seemingly more popular but secondary role as an international human rights court, the authors apply this article for the purpose trying understand and explain the rationale and manner of this transformation.
The authors have made very compelling arguments in support of their theoretical claim that international institutions, including international courts adapt to changing norms and societal pressures such that rational functionalist goals do not exclusively determine how a given international institution ultimately turns after its creation. While I find myself in agreement with much of the article, it is in relation to this claim and the evidence supplied by the authors in proof thereof that I find my first challenge.
Last March, I took the world media (and Alan Dershowitz) to task for some pretty poor reporting on the extradition issues raised in the Amanda Knox case. Based on the reporting from yesterday's conviction (again) of Amanda Knox in an Italian appeals court in Florence, I'm glad to report that the news coverage of the extradition issue (as well as...
Following up on my earlier posts on the normative aspects of the struggle concerning Ukraine and other former Soviet countries (1, 2, 3) in the run-up to, and the aftermath of, the EU's November summit in Vilnius, where Ukraine had been expected to sign an Association Agreement with the EU. However, the Yanukovich regime backed out at the last minute....
[Jonathan Hafetz is an Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law. This post is written as a comment to Stuart Ford's guest post, published yesterday.]
Stuart Ford’s article, Complexity and Efficiency at International Criminal Courts, seeks to address the common misperception that international criminal trials are not only expensive, but also inefficient. Professor Ford’s article focuses principally on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which, in terms of the total number of accused, is the largest international criminal tribunal in history. Professor Ford seeks to measure whether the ICTY has, in effect, provided good bang for the buck. He concludes, rightly I believe, that it has. Although his primary aim is to develop a way for measuring a tribunal’s efficiency, Professor Ford’s article also has important implications for broader debates about the merits of international criminal justice.
Professor Ford defines efficiency as the complexity of a trial divided by its cost. While trials at the ICTY often have been long and expensive, they have also been relatively efficient given their complexity. Further, the ICTY preforms relatively well compared to other trials of similar complexity, such as terrorism trials conducted in the United States and Europe, as well as trials that are somewhat less complex, such as the average U.S. death penalty case. Garden-variety domestic murder trials, which at first blush might appear more efficient than the ICTY, do not provide a useful point of comparison because they are much more straightforward.
Once complexity is factored in, the ICTY appears comparatively efficient. Its record is more impressive considering that an often recognized goal of international criminal justice—creating a historical record of mass atrocities—can make the trials slower and less efficient in terms of reaching outcomes for specific defendants.
Professor Ford also finds that the ICTY performed more efficiently than the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), thus challenging a perceived advantage of such hybrid tribunals over ad hoc tribunals like the ICTY. His conclusion suggests the need for future research on comparisons among tribunals within the international criminal justice field, which might have implications from an institutional design perspective.
The New York Times reports that Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economics professor, has been arrested by Chinese authorities for separatism and inciting ethnic hatred. A number of his students are also seemingly being detained. Tohti is just one person and, perhaps unfortunately for him, his case is emblematic of larger regional tensions in China and Central Asia. The Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking ethnic group, about...
Jess Bravin has an interesting report out in Thursday's WSJ (subscrip. req'd) detailing U.S., UK, and EU support (and funding) for a team of investigators to gather evidence of war crimes by Syrian government and military officials. For nearly two years, dozens of investigators funded by the U.S. and its allies have been infiltrating Syria to collect evidence of suspected war crimes, sometimes...
[Dr. Chantal Meloni teaches international criminal law at the University of Milan is an Alexander von Humboldt Scholar at Humboldt University of Berlin.]
1. A new complaint (technically a Communication under art. 15 of the Rome Statute) has been lodged on the 10th of January to the Intentional Criminal Court, requesting the Prosecutor to open an investigation into the denounced abuses committed by UK military forces against Iraqi detainees from 2003 to 2008. The complaint has been presented by the British Public Interest Lawyers (PIL), representing more than 400 Iraqi victims, jointly with the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). The lawyers’ allegation is that grave mistreatments, including torture and other degrading abuse techniques, were commonly used during the six years in which the UK and Multinational Forces operated in Iraq. According to the victims’ account the mistreatment was so serious, widespread and spanned across all stages of detention as to amount to “systemic torture”. Out of hundreds of allegations, the lawyers focused in particular and in depth on eighty-five cases to represent the mistreatment and abuses inflicted, which would clearly amount to war crimes. 2. This is not the first time that the behaviour of the UK military forces in Iraq is challenged before the ICC. In fact, hundreds of complaints have been brought on various grounds both to domestic courts and to the ICC since the beginning of the war. As for the ICC, after the initial opening of a preliminary examination, following to over 404 communications by Iraqi victims, in 2006 the ICC Prosecutor issued a first decision determining not to open an investigation in the UK responsibilities in Iraq. According to that decision, although there was a reasonable basis to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court had been committed, namely wilful killing and inhumane treatment, the gravity threshold was not met. Indeed the number of victims that had been taken into account at that time was very limited, totalling in all less than 20 persons, so that the Prosecutor found that the ‘quantitative criteria’, a key consideration of the ICC prosecutorial strategy when assessing the gravity threshold, was not fulfilled. Therefore, what is there new that in the view of the lawyers warranted the re-proposition of such a request? In the first place it shall be noted in this regard that during the eight years that passed since then many more abuse allegations have emerged (see the Complaint, p. 110 ff.). Most notably, hundreds of torture and mistreatment allegations show a pattern - spanning across time, technique and location - which would indicate the existence of a (criminal) policy adopted by the UK military forces when dealing with the interrogation of Iraqi detainees under their custody. In the words of the lawyers, “it was not the result of personal misconduct on the part of a few individual soldiers, but rather, constituted widespread and systematic mistreatment perpetrated by the UK forces as a whole”.The decision was given orally, and no written decision is available yet. But here is what The Standard's online platform is reporting: The International Criminal Court has conditionally excused Deputy President William Ruto from continuos presence at trial but with some conditions. The judges outlined nine conditions during the Wednesday ruling. ICC Presiding Judge Eboe-Osuji in the oral ruling said: “The Chamber hereby...
A subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee held a much-needed hearing to educate themselves on China's recent activity in the East and South China Seas. Professor Peter Dutton of the Naval War College, along with two other experts on Asian affairs, gave interesting and useful testimony on the nature of China's maritime disputes with Japan, the...