In association with the International Commission of Jurists

AJIL Symposium: Sadat response to Robinson and van Sliedregt

23 Jul

[Leila Nadya Sadat is the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law and Director, Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute, at Washington University School of Law] I found the comments of my colleagues very thoughtful and helpful to my own continuing engagement with the law in this area.  As Elies points out, sovereignty concerns are indeed central to the original conceptualization of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, and remain a preoccupation of the Rome Statute that the ICC’s judges are charged with interpretation.  As she notes, this thread of the Kaul dissent is unobjectionable.  She then turns to the question of “human-ness” – the focus of the Rome Statute and indeed, all of modern international criminal law, on the protection of “humanity” as a second value embedded in Article 7 of the Rome Statute.  I agree with this, and with Darryl’s understanding of much of the chapeau element’s purpose being essentially jurisdictional in nature – a way of sorting out permissible and impermissible exercises of international jurisdiction that will keep cases that belong in national courts in those courts and cases that need to be adjudicated internationally at the ICC (or elsewhere).  Indeed, one of the most interesting developments in international criminal law has been the elaboration of a fairly clear framework for the elaboration of a set of jurisdictional principles – complementarity, gravity, the widespread or systematic nature of the harm, the victim or the harm caused some specific damage to an international interest (i.e., attacks on UN peacekeepers), the shocking nature of the harm, etc. – to sift cases properly before international criminal courts from those properly tried elsewhere.  These jurisdictional bases overlap, but they are, by and large, alternative, not cumulative or, in the Rome Statute system, are directed to admissibility rather than “jurisdiction” strictly speaking.  Certainly, by electing the formulation “state or organizational policy,” it seems that the drafters of the Rome Statute were suggesting that non-state actors, if they committed attacks upon civilians that were sufficiently widespread and systematic, could perpetrate the kinds of atrocity crimes the Rome Statute was adopted to address; which is why I believe the majority in the Kenya case had the better view. Likewise, although I cannot comment on the Gbagbo decision as it is being appealed by the Prosecutor (assuming leave is given), I am grateful to Darryl for pointing out how the Majority exhibits the same trend I highlight in my article which is to disaggregate the statutory requirements and create new elements required to establish crimes against humanity not required by the Rome Statute.  As I note in Crimes Against Humanity in the Modern Age, one of the strangest of these is the requirement, first surfacing as a negative in obiter dictum, then apparently copied into other opinions as a new element, that the Prosecutor must identify what group – national, ethnic, religious, etc. -- the civilians belong to in order to demonstrate the existence of an attack.  The introduction of this language into the Court’s case law is unfortunate.  It may be useful to describe the group to demonstrate a policy to attack all those of a certain ethnicity, but unless persecution or genocide is charged, the appurtenance (or not) of victims to a particular group is simply irrelevant to finding that attack upon civilians has been carried out. Darryl’s comments made me wonder whether I completely support the reintroduction into the ICC Statute of the “state or organizational policy” requirement.
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23 Jul

[Elies van Sliedregt is the Dean and Professor of Criminal Law at VU University Amsterdam] In this article Leila Sadat convincingly makes clear that CAH are central to international prosecutions. She points to the importance of CAH at the ICC with its potential to intervene in peace-time. Sadat underscores the importance of CAH as gap-filler; it provides for jurisdiction in the absence of an armed conflict and addresses discriminatory campaigns that do not qualify as genocide. The independent existence of CAH has become clearer over the years. CAH prosecutions capture key social harms and particular patterns of victimization, such as ethnic cleansing or sexual slavery. While CAH have gained importance as an independent category of crimes and according to Sadat “have emerged from the shadow of Nuremberg” (p. 336), we cannot ignore that CAH’s raison d’être is that of solving a jurisdictional problem. This goes back to the period before Nuremberg. For centuries international law has recognized the enemy of all mankind, the hostis humani generis. Pirates, who had no allegiance to a state and who committed crimes beyond the jurisdictional control of States, were regarded as the enemy of all mankind. With the interests of ‘mankind’ affected, all nations had a right to fill a jurisdictional void and exercise (universal) jurisdiction. Similarly, the notion of ‘humanity’ justifies intervention by way of criminal law enforcement. When States fail to protect, or are engaged themselves in harm to the security and subsistence of their subjects, they forfeit their privileges as a sovereign entity; other States or an international court may step in. While both ‘mankind’ (for piracy) and ‘humanity’ (for CAH) provide a justification for intervening in domestic affairs, the underlying reasoning and interests differ. Piracy more directly harms the interests of a multitude of States; self-interest prompts the exercise of jurisdiction. CAH, on the other hand, can be confined to one country.  They affect the interests of other States in that they shock “the conscious of mankind” (UK prosecutor Shawcross in his opening statement in Nuremberg). They are so egregious that it is in the international community’s interest that they are punished. This is what Arendt meant when she referred to the Holocaust as “crimes against mankind committed on the body of the Jewish people”. Viewing CAH through the prism of jurisdictional justification makes clear that sovereignty is a concern with CAH. For the international community to intervene, CAH must qualify as an international harm. They must shock the conscience of mankind. While this leaves pertinent questions unanswered, (is there a world community? with a common conscience?) it is clear that CAH must reach a level that distinguishes them from domestic crimes. The contextual elements of CAH, that crimes are committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack pursuant to a State or organizational policy, must ensure that this level is met. Judge Kaul is sensitive to sovereignty concerns. In his dissenting opinion to the Article 15 Kenya Decision he opines that the policy element is a decisive, characteristic and indispensable feature of crimes against humanity; it distinguishes ordinary crimes from international crimes and should therefore be interpreted narrowly. Sadat criticizes Judge Kaul’s view for denying CAH’s modern meaning, as a residual category of crimes that protect human values, values the ICC was established to protect. ‘Organizational’ in Article 7(2)(a) should include non-State(-like) organizations. What to think of this disagreement? 
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22 Jul

[Darryl Robinson is Associate Professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law] I am delighted to offer this comment on Leila Sadat’s excellent article on crimes against humanity in the modern age.  Her article makes several important contributions. I agree with her central normative point, which is that ICC jurisprudence has often been too restrictive and too demanding in its interpretation of the policy element. If we trace the history of academic discourse around the policy element, we see that it has had gone through cycles of ascendance and decline.  For decades after Nuremberg, the policy element seemed fairly generally supported (see eg Keenan, Bassiouni).  In the nineties, following this tradition, it was recognized in the Tadic decision and the ICC Statute.  Around that time, however, the tide of academic opinion turned against it.  Most commentary grew quite skeptical. The nadir for the element was the ICTY’s about-face in Kunarac, which repudiated the element en passant in a highly controversial footnote. Recently, the element has enjoyed a scholarly resurgence, led by thoughtful pieces by Bill Schabas (here) and Claus Kress (here), advocating that a policy element is not only legally required but conceptually required, in order for the law of crimes against humanity to make sense.  I am in a very similar camp to these two scholars, in that I think that some form of policy element has doctrinal support and, more importantly, is conceptually essential. My only caveat was that the element was perhaps at times cast a bit too stringently. Leila’s article is a leading and welcome example of the latest movement, which is a mildly corrective counter-movement, arguing for a modest threshold. Leila gives arguments based in customary law precedents for an inclusive concept of the type of ‘organization’ that may be behind a crimes against humanity.  In a similar direction, Gerhard Werle and Boris Burghardt give arguments based in the ordinary meaning of the term ‘organization’ (here), and Charles Jalloh has noted the possible Euro-centricism of a rigid concept of organization that does not regard tribal groups as a sufficient form of organization (here). I have also given arguments based in the theory underlying the element (here).  While I acknowledge that the narrower view, requiring a state-like entity, can also be supported by a principled theory (‘betrayal of the responsibility to protect’), I suggested that the essence of crimes against humanity may be humans acting collectively to harm humans.  The purpose of the policy element is simply to exclude the ‘normal’ crime patterns of individuals acting on their own initiatives.  This purpose is satisfied by a modest threshold, encompassing coordination by many types of organization.  I think Leila’s contrast of a ‘traditional’ and a ‘modern’ view of the dangers posed by organizations is another helpful contribution. In this comment, I wish to expand upon Leila’s thesis, by highlighting the most recent confirmation decision in Gbagbo. 
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22 Jul

[Leila Nadya Sadat is the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law and Director, Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute, at Washington University School of Law] I am honored to participate in this Opinio Juris/AJIL forum discussion, and wish to thank, in advance, the editors for agreeing to host it, and Elies van Sliedregt and Darryl Robinson for agreeing to comment. Crimes Against Humanity in the Modern Age emerged out of my leadership of the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, a multi-year project undertaken by the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University School of Law, and directed by a Steering Committee of distinguished jurists, that, over the course of three years, examined the need for and assessed the feasibility of drafting a new convention for the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity.  During our discussions it became clear that participants believed crimes against humanity (CAH) charges to be critically important to both international and domestic prosecutions of atrocity crimes, but there was little empirical data to support these intuitions.  I set out to systematically examine every case brought to the ad hoc international criminal tribunals to determine which charges were brought and which were successful in order to get a sense whether or not these could properly be labeled “crimes against humanity courts,” as some scholars have observed. In a second step, it seemed important to see how this analysis would play out at the International Criminal Court (ICC).  Tables 1-6 in the article summarize this data. Collecting and sorting the data was difficult as indictments at the ad hoc tribunals were often amended, and appeals regularly set aside or added additional counts.  I am indebted to the Harris Institute staff members who assisted me, as well as my research assistants Sam Chaffin and Shishir Jani who pored through the information and reworked it time and time again.  The ICC presented a particular challenge as there are no “indictments” but a “document containing the charges” followed by a confirmation decision, making it sometimes difficult to assess what the charges are in a particular case.  However, based upon the information available on the websites of three of the tribunals – the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (the ICTY and ICTR) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) – and the ICC, it was possible to ascertain overall prosecution and conviction rates for each of the core crimes. Interestingly, the data suggested that war crimes counts dominated at the ICTY and SCSL, but CAH (and genocide) counts dominated at the ICTR.  Both the ICTY and the ICTR had conviction rates on CAH that were higher than the war crimes conviction rates; this was not true for the SCSL.   The pattern for cases involving armed conflicts remained relatively stable across all courts and tribunals (and situations at the ICC), and suggest about a 55-45 ratio of war crimes counts to CAH counts, except at the ICTR and for situations at the ICC in which only CAH have been charged. At the ICTY, only two out of 161 defendants were charged solely with crimes against humanity, representing 1.2 percent of all accused.  At the ICTR, only two out of 90 defendants were charged solely with crimes against humanity, representing 2.2 percent of all accused.  This is in sharp contrast with the pattern at the ICC before which, at the time the article was written, 11 out of 30 accused were charged only with crimes against humanity in the Kenya, Libya and Côte d’Ivoire cases, representing a stunning 36.7 percent of all accused. Turning to a more normative and qualitative assessment of the data, the article postulates that the increase in “CAH only” cases at the ICC is to be expected because the ICC is a permanent court, created prior to the onset of atrocities in many cases, that can intervene in times of peace, not only once war has begun.  This, in turn, suggests that David Scheffer’s intuition about peacetime atrocity crimes being “pre-cursors of genocide” may also be correct, although more research is required to fully explore this hypothesis. The article painstakingly analyzes the ICC’s early jurisprudence on crimes against humanity, and concludes that there is some cause for concern. 
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21 Jul

[Solon Solomon will join King’s College of London, Dickson Poon School of Law as of September 2013, and Jackson Nyamuya Maogoto is a Faculty member of the University of Manchester, School of Law.] Much has already been written on the Comoros referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in light of the Mavi Marmara incident (EJIL:Talk!, Opinio Juris, Human Rights Blog and Dov Jacobs Blog). The referral while premised on a legal footing arguably has a second facet which is significant—political. It is as been noted elsewhere (EJIL:Talk!) that this was the first case where an African state referred a non-African state to the Court. The political parameter aside, the Comoros referral introduces two important doctrinal issues which pervade the discussions of this referral. These are article 12(2) of the Rome Statute regarding vessel jurisdiction and the legal discourse around the axiom that all State Parties can refer to the Court possible crimes perpetrated on the territory of a State Party. The authors’ assertion is that the two spectra have wider implications for future cases and thus their elaboration is essential in the realm of the Prosecutor’s response to the Comoros referral. As far as jurisdiction is concerned, we add our voice to authors who have so far who have held this is asserted. (See EJIL:Talk!, Opinio Juris and Human Rights Blog-spot) In this particular piece we would like to argue that such an assertion is de lege lata and not necessarily the case de lege ferenda. The assertion of jurisdiction derives from article 12(2)’s grammatical reading. However it is imperative to bear in mind that since the Rome Statute is a negotiated treaty, it is subject to wider reflection other than the narrow confines of the black letter provision. In this regard we aver that as a treaty, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) is at play and in this regard invite consideration that the treaty provisions as provided for in the VCLT should be read in their contextual and historical depth, including their negotiation history and the volition of the parties. As such, there are elements that accompany the Rome Statute provisions on vessel jurisdiction which while not embedded in the wording of the provision itself, still constitute part of its essence. The Rome Statute provision was drafted along the lines of article 91 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The latter, echoing a strong jurisprudence and treaty tradition stipulates and favours the notion that there must be a genuine link between the flag state and the vessel. This genuine link requirement is critical. While in some instances judicial bodies may have appeared reluctant to assert it, the reason was not its denial, but judicial and academic fears that a strict diligence to the principle would eventually preclude the forging of any nationality bonds, a far worse scenario. In the MV “Saiga” (No.2) case, the International Tribunal on Law of the Sea expressly stated that the role of the genuine link requirement is to secure more effective implementation of the duties of the flag state. UNCLOS does not envision an arrangement where states just confer nationality to ships and then are not at all engaged in their activities. Nationality is regarded as having a functional character. States try to protect social bonds of attachment against mere formal nationality imposed by the technicalities of law. This functional inquisition is evident in diverse fora. For example in the case of UN sanctions, such as those against Serbia and Iran, the relevant Security Council Resolutions considered the nationality of the vessel based on ownership or contract terms, regardless of the flag under which the ship may sail. (see UN SC Res 787 (1992) and UN SC Res 1929 (2010)). Essentially then, Article 91(1) of UNCLOS should be read in conjunction with article 94, in a way that the exercise of effective jurisdiction over the vessel constitutes one of the necessary conditions for granting nationality. It is thus too long a legal bow to draw that with embryonic jurisprudence on the subject, the ICC will have in mind previous positions and thus reflect on its article 12(2) vessel jurisdiction as not only encapsulating the straight line reading on flag jurisdiction but also the matter of a genuine link with the vessel particularly given the nature of its mandate. In the case of Comoros, the Mavi Marmara was Comoros flagged just a week before the flotilla incident.
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20 Jul

As I was checking my news feeds on Google News, I came across this: The snail photo is not actually part of the Washington Post article. So does that mean Google shares my concern with Libya's endless stall tactics?...

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19 Jul

Well, not really. But that's the unintended consequence of yesterday's awful decision in US v. Sterling, in which the Fourth Circuit held that James Risen could not rely on journalist's privilege to avoid testifying against James Sterling, whom the government believes leaked classified information to Risen. According the court, the government is entitled to Risen's testimony, because he is the...

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19 Jul

[Chelsea Purvis is the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow at Minority Rights Group International (MRG).  Opinions expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of MRG.] The African region has long been perceived as a recipient, not a creator, of international human rights law.  But over the past decade, African institutions have enshrined emerging human rights norms in treaties and issued ground-breaking jurisprudence.  Africa should be recognized as a generator of innovative human rights law.  Human rights institutions outside the continent, however, have largely failed to engage with African-made human rights law. An example of innovative African law-making is the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol), which came into force in 2005.  The Maputo Protocol builds on existing women’s rights law: Like the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Maputo Protocol obligates States parties to combat discrimination against women in all areas of life.  And like the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women, the Maputo Protocol prohibits physical, sexual, and psychological violence against women.  But the Protocol goes further than these earlier treaties.  For the first time in any international instrument, it prohibits verbal and economic violence against women. The Maputo Protocol contains notable protections for women’s reproductive rights, including an affirmative right to abortion in certain circumstances.  It also takes a conceptual leap forward in its treatment of culture and tradition.  Many sources of women’s rights law treat African cultures as uniformly negative for women. The Maputo Protocol, as Johanna Bond has argued, adopts the more nuanced approach advanced by scholars from the global South.  It recognizes the positive role culture can play in women’s lives but enshrines a woman’s right to shape her culture.  The Protocol also recognizes that certain culturally-authorized practices or beliefs are necessarily harmful to women—it prohibits, for example, female genital mutilation and exploitation in pornography. Another ground-breaking source of African human rights law is a 2010 decision by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. 
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18 Jul

In the wake of the Pre-Trial Chamber's categorical rejection of Libya's admissibility challenge, the Libyan government asked the Appeals Chamber to suspend its obligation to transfer Saif Gaddafi to the ICC pending its appeal of the decision. The Appeals Chamber has now rejected that request and ordered Libya to surrender Saif to the Court. Here are the critical paragraphs of its decision: 24. Libya...

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18 Jul

[Tendayi Achiume is the Binder Teaching Fellow at the UCLA School of Law.] According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), xenophobia is among the greatest contemporary challenges to the protection of refugees and other forced migrants globally. The May 2008 violent attacks against foreign nationals in South Africa are among the most striking contemporary manifestations of this problem. During a two-week period of violence, media reported door-to-door searches in townships and inner cities as inflamed crowds attempted to purge neighborhoods of foreign nationals they blamed for high rates of crime and job scarcity, among other things. These attacks left 62 dead, over 600 injured, and displaced more than 100,000 people—many of whose homes and property were looted in the process. Refugees were among the most severely affected. Although the scale and duration of the attacks in South Africa were remarkable, xenophobic discrimination is a serious problem in contexts as disparate as Greece, France, Ukraine, Israel, Libya and Egypt, where it threatens the lives and livelihoods of refugees and other forced migrants. In this post I briefly describe UNHCR’s response to this problem, which has focused on advocacy to punish hate crimes and to promote tolerance. While recognizing the importance of these measures, I argue that on their own they are inadequate. Engaging structural socio-economic concerns such as inequality and poverty is vital to successfully combating xenophobia, and must form a central part of UNHCR’s response. International law does not define the term “xenophobia”. UNHCR posits that xenophobia may include “discrimination, incitement to discrimination, as well as acts of violence or incitement to violent acts on the grounds of race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin, including in combination with other grounds, such as religion, gender or disability.” In the last decade or so, UNHCR has undertaken a range of global policy and advocacy initiatives to combat xenophobic discrimination. The most comprehensive articulation of UNHCR’s policy points to the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) as the legal anchor at the international level for fighting xenophobic discrimination. In a forthcoming article in the Georgetown Journal of International Law’s Spring 2014 volume, I conduct a novel and in-depth analysis of UNHCR’s use of international human rights to fight xenophobic discrimination. But here I wish to highlight a pressing concern with the evolution of UNHCR’s policy in this area. A review of UNHCR’s approach reveals two broad categories, both of which find firm support in ICERD. The first focuses on punishing perpetrators of discriminatory acts explicitly motivated by xenophobic prejudice. Examples include advocacy to promote and enforce hate crimes legislation, to monitor signs of prejudice, and to track and publicize hate crimes prosecutions. The second category of strategies focuses on the use of human rights education initiatives and public awareness campaigns to fight prejudice and promote tolerance and diversity. Punishing perpetrators and promoting tolerance and diversity are important strategies for protecting refugees from xenophobia. But on their own, these strategies are unequal to their task.
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17 Jul

[Daniel Seah is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Laws, University College London.] Has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) finally had its own post-ontological moment?  No longer are we condemned to participate in the banality of questioning ASEAN’s legal existence as an international organization (IO). After all, since 2008, its international legal personality was expressly conferred in Article 3 of the ASEAN Charter, a constituent treaty.  Now is the time to ask a more useful question: what are the legal consequences that flow from ASEAN exercising its international legal personality? Nowhere is an answer to this question more clearly thrown into relief than in the conferral of competences by member States upon ASEAN, which is the focus of this post. IOs are not created equal; there is a great variety in their functions and objectives. Establishing the objective international legal personalities in these IOs is the easy bit. More difficult are the issues that bear on how the legal personality has been exercised by an IO; and what legal consequences arise for the IO and its member States, as separate legal persons. Because an IO at international law is a legal person, it (or its bodies) can act on behalf of member States although some of these acts are not expressly conferred in the constituent treaty - I call these “implied conferrals”. The word “conferral” is not a legal term of art. It had been variously defined as “capacities” (CF Amerasinghe) to indicate the consequences of international legal personality; “international delegations” (Curtis Bradley & Judith Kelley) to explain a range of legal (and non-legal) decision-making exercised by IOs; or “competences” on which the European Union (EU) is authorised to act in particular areas such as the common commercial policy. In this post, I instance the early practice of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) as an example of implied conferrals.
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16 Jul

[Ozan Varol is Assistant Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School.] Since the Egyptian military ousted President Mohamed Morsi, various commentators have pondered whether the military’s actions fit within the framework I described in an article titled The Democratic Coup d’Etat, published last summer in the Harvard International Law Journal (see here, here, here, here, and here).  In this post, I will discuss whether Morsi’s ouster was a coup—the United States remains unwilling to use the magic word—and if so, whether it constitutes a “democratic coup.”  I will conclude the post by analyzing why the Turkish government stands largely alone among foreign governments in its staunch and vocal opposition to Morsi’s ouster. Was Morsi’s ouster a coup?  The answer is yes.  Initially, there was arguably some room for legal interpretation, primarily because the academic literature is rife with competing definitions of a coup d’état. Under most definitions, however, Morsi’s ouster was a coup from the outset. For example, Samuel Huntington defines a coup as “the effort by a political coalition illegally to replace the existing governmental leaders by violence or the threat of violence.”  Likewise, Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne define coups as “overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting head of state using unconstitutional means.” The Egyptian military ousted a democratically elected president through the use of extra-legal and extra-constitutional means. That is surely a coup d’état under these definitions. Under an alternative understanding, however, a coup occurs “when the military, or a section of the military, turns its coercive power against the apex of the state, establishes itself there, and the rest of the state takes its orders from the new regime.”  Charles Sampford, Coups d’Etat and Law, in Shaping Revolution 164 (E. Attwooll ed., 1991).  That is not precisely what happened in Egypt because the military established an interim government run by civilian, not military, leaders—a marked departure from the coup that deposed Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and replaced it with an interim government composed of military leaders (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or SCAF). Even under this alternative definition, however, Morsi’s ouster likely constitutes a coup since a constitutional declaration issued by the interim civilian President cited the military’s takeover statement as the basis of his own authority.  In other words, even though the military is not actively supervising the transition process as it did following Mubarak’s ouster, the military currently appears to be the ultimate source of governmental authority in Egypt. Was the coup a “democratic coup”? 
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