“Specific Direction” is Indefensible: A Response to Heller on Complicity
[James G. Stewart is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. He is also presently a Global Hauser Fellow at New York University School of Law.] Last week, Kevin Heller posted an insightful and provocative defense of the “specific direction” standard for aiding and abetting the ICTY has newly announced in the Perišić and Stanišić cases. Although I believe that his arguments fall well short of justifying the conclusion he endorses, his argument intelligently brings together many of the intuitions that seem to have shaped this new definition of complicity. It is also a credit to Kevin that he agreed to post my earlier two-part criticism of this novel definition of complicity here and here despite harboring contrary intuitions, and that he generously welcomed this further response now. All of this out of an obvious commitment to even-handedness and frank debate. But with praise for my friend aside, let me move to criticize aspects of his argument that I believe defend the indefensible.At the outset, I am concerned by the structure of Kevin’s reasoning. Kevin (and apparently the ICTY judges he supports) seem to reason inductively, taking the putative innocence of weapons transfers by American and British governments to Syrian rebels as a point of departure. Although I’m sure Kevin just means to use a well-known contemporary example to illustrate his concerns, the optics are bad for him and the ICTY—by backing into this issue with the a priori assumption that American and British practices are necessarily beyond reproach, the reasoning risks substantiating views (so common now among African leaders and TWAIL scholars) that the discipline is structurally biased. To preserve the impartiality and therefore legitimacy of international criminal law, surely we should start with a morally defensible concept of complicity, then let responsibility attach where it may. Otherwise, the new “specifically directed” test speaks to darker problems that infect the entire system.