In association with the International Commission of Jurists

MJIL Symposium: A Response to James Stewart by Darryl Robinson

15 Nov

[Darryl Robinson is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I am very grateful for James Stewart’s comments on “How Command Responsibility Got So Complicated”. Professor Stewart and I are engaged in similar projects (criminal law theory and international criminal law (‘ICL’)) and immersed in similar literature, so our discussions are always very helpful to me, even though we at times reach different conclusions. Professor Stewart raises several interesting points, and I cannot quite do justice to all of them. I offer the following thoughts on the main points. As a preliminary point, Professor Stewart rightly notes that people at the Tribunal had done a frenzied review of the relevant literature and so were at least aware of these issues. I take that point very much. Academics are often quick to criticise courts and institutions for their alleged failures to consider this or that issue, when perhaps the relevant actors were in fact deeply aware of it but chose not to elaborate on it given the hundred other priorities they had to attend to. I also sympathise with judges, who are either criticised for failure to elaborate on theoretical underpinnings, or alternatively are criticised for their wordy, theoretical decisions. For precisely these reasons, I ‘emphatically acknowledged’ that the Tribunals were operating in a pioneering phase, dealing with countless questions and constructing doctrinal rules from diverse authorities, and hence could not give detailed consideration to every fine point.[1]
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15 Nov

[Darryl Robinson is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I am delighted to participate in this online symposium, this time at the receiving end. The emergence of online symposia is a commendable innovation which I am eager to support. When academic conversation is carried out through journal articles, the rhythm is glacially slow. Years pass between argument, counterargument and response. Online symposia provide a rapid cycle of appraisal, critique, response and clarification, both accelerating and deepening our understanding. In this instance I am doubly delighted, as I literally cannot imagine a more qualified group of reviewers on this topic. Ilias Bantekas is one of the most prominent authorities on command responsibility. I relied considerably on his insightful and thoughtful works on command responsibility as well as his valuable treatise on international criminal law (ICL).  Jens Ohlin and James Stewart are both bringing the rigour of criminal law theory to ICL, and doing so in an ambitious, exciting, open-minded way that does not simply export national concepts.  I will address the comments by Professor Bantekas and Professor Ohlin here, and address James’ comments separately. My argument — that the discourse on command responsibility has slowly tied itself into unnecessary knots — was not necessarily one that was guaranteed a warm reception in the ICL community. I am therefore triply delighted, in that both Professor Bantekas and Professor Ohlin seem largely convinced about my central points: that an early misstep in Tribunal jurisprudence led to an internal contradiction, and that later efforts to deny or, subsequently, to solve the contradiction, have led to increasingly elusive or complex assertions about the nature of command responsibility (eg, it’s a mode of liability, a separate offence, it’s both, it’s neither, etc). In my article, my prescription is that by reversing the first misstep and accepting a causal contribution requirement, we can reconcile the law with the culpability principle. The existing general category of accessory liability accurately conveys the commander’s responsibility, and we don’t need to invent obscure, vague, hybrid or variegated descriptions of the nature of command responsibility. Professor Ohlin and Professor Bantekas both move to the next question, which is a normative assessment from a legislator’s perspective – what we might do with a blank canvass.
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15 Nov

[James Stewart is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, Faculty of Law. He is currently undertaking a Global Hauser Fellowship at New York University School of Law.] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. It is a pleasure to be invited to comment on Professor Darryl Robinson’s excellent new article How Command Responsibility Got So Complicated. His meticulous research has, once again, advanced our understanding considerably. Indeed, this particular article is but the most recent manifestation of Professor Robinson’s groundbreaking commitment to marrying criminal theory and international criminal doctrine in ways that shed new light on dilemmas that have plagued scholars and practitioners for too long. In this piece, he focuses on the much-disputed physical contribution of the failure to punish limb of superior responsibility. Some say that a superior can be convicted of genocide, for example, for failing to punish acts of her subordinates who perpetrated the crime, but Professor Robinson joins others who protest that this violates the principle of culpability. How can you be held responsible for a crime to which you did not contribute? Conversely, those who argue that failures to punish can be re-imagined as a separate conduct-type crime stripped of consequences to overcome the participation problem ignore that international law does not support that reading. Instead, Professor Robinson concludes that subsuming superior responsibility within everyday notions of accessorial liability offers a more elegant solution. I feel compelled to start my review of the piece with a confession of sorts. In my former incarnation as an Appeals Counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (‘ICTY’), I had a hand in formulating the Prosecution’s position on superior responsibility in a range of the cases that are key to Professor Robinson’s argument (Hadžihasanović, Orić, and Halilović). In part, I admit this in order to disclose a potential impurity in my views on the topic (although, for balance, my own views were different from the position ultimately adopted by the Prosecution in these cases, contrary to the conclusion ultimately reached by the Appeals Chamber that ruled on them, and I may have changed them again since reading Professor Robinson’s provocative article). For present purposes, though, this experience is also germane since it leads me to think that Professor Robinson might be too quick in arguing that the ICTY has not wrestled with these issues; to the contrary, all sides were engaged in a frenzied review of much of the literature Professor Robinson cites in an attempt to deal with precisely these problems, although no one came close to addressing the topic with anything approaching the sophistication Professor Robinson now offers. Sometimes an absence of judicial reasoning just conceals issues too complex to articulate.
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15 Nov

[Jens David Ohlin is an Associate Professor of Law at Cornell Law School; he blogs at LieberCode.] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Professor Darryl Robinson is to be commended for untangling what has to be one of the most tangled webs in international criminal law theory. The settled jurisprudence on command responsibility is anything but settled; it is contradictory, confusing, and full of conclusory statements and pronouncements that don’t hold water. With Professor Robinson, I’ve viewed with suspicion the recent trend toward arguing that command responsibility is a form of omission liability, or even a separate offence. Regardless of whether one goes the full route and declare it a separate offence, this basic idea is the same: that command responsibility represents a conviction for dereliction of duty, for failing to live up to the demands of the law on the part of the commander, such as punishing subordinates. Under this argument, command responsibility is not a form of vicarious liability for the actions of subordinates who commit atrocities. Like Professor Robinson, I have always found this view difficult to square with both the history and contemporary practice of command responsibility. In particular, Re Yamashita certainly reads like a case of vicarious responsibility, in that the military commission charged him with the full force of the atrocities — and executed him for it. If it was just an omission offence, then it is hard to square that with both the rhetoric and result in re Yamashita. At this point in the analysis, though, I might have some small disagreements with Professor Robinson.
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15 Nov

[Ilias Bantekas is Professor of Law at Brunel University in London.] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Causality is central in the operation of criminal attribution in all legal systems. It makes sense of course that liability for particular conduct exists where it is proven...

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15 Nov

[Darryl Robinson is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Much has been written about command responsibility. In my article, I argue that views on the nature of command responsibility have become unnecessarily obscure and convoluted, and that the problem flows from an early misstep in the jurisprudence. If we revisit the first misstep, a simple and elegant solution is available. Famously, early Tribunal jurisprudence concluded that the ‘failure to punish’ branch of command responsibility is irreconcilable with a contribution requirement. It therefore rejected any requirement that the commander’s dereliction contributed to core crimes. This however generated a contradiction, because Tribunal jurisprudence (1) recognizes the culpability principle, whereby causal contribution is necessary to share in liability for a crime and yet (2) uses command responsibility to convict commanders of core crimes without causal contribution. Subsequent efforts to deny the resulting contradiction, and later efforts to avoid the contradiction, have spawned many inconsistent, complex and convoluted claims about command responsibility. These include the descriptions of command responsibility as responsibility for-the-acts-but-not-for-the-acts, as a ‘sui generis’ hybrid whose nature has not been explained, as neither-mode-nor-offence, or as sometimes-mode-sometimes-offence. Many such descriptions are elusively vague, and necessarily so, because clarity would reveal the contradiction.
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14 Nov

I have been having an interesting twitter exchange with Ben Wittes about an online "Choose Your Own Adventure" game created by the Truman National Security Project.  The game, which is entitled "Tell Me How This Ends," asks you to decide how the President of the United States should respond to news that Iran has accumulated enough enriched uranium to build...

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14 Nov

[Thomas G Weiss is a Presidential Professor of Political Science at The CUNY Graduate Center and Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Professor Spencer Zifcak’s article on the international reactions to Libya and Syria is thorough and...

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14 Nov

[Ramesh Thakur is Director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (CNND) in the Crawford School, Australian National University and Adjunct Professor in the Institute of Ethics, Governance and Law at Griffith University.] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Professor Spencer Zifcak has written an insightful article on a topic that is important, timely and will not go away. His analysis and conclusions are judicious, circumspect, balanced and, in consequence, stand the test of time since the article was written. I would like to make four points in summary and add three items to his analysis. First, the use of force, no matter how benevolent, enlightened and impartial in intent, has empirical consequences and shapes the struggle for power and helps to determine the outcome of that political contest. This is why it is inherently controversial and contentious. Secondly, the Responsibility to Protect (‘R2P’) is the normative instrument of choice for converting a shocked international conscience into decisive collective action — for channelling selective moral indignation into collective policy remedies — to prevent and stop atrocities. In the vacuum of responsibility for the safety of the marginalised, stigmatised and dehumanised out-group subject to mass atrocities, R2P provides an entry point for the international community to step in and take up the moral and military slack. Its moral essence is the acceptance of a duty of care by all those who live in zones of safety towards those trapped in zones of danger. It strikes a balance between unilateral interference and institutionalised indifference. But the precise point along the continuum is not easily ascertained in the fog of armed violence amidst chaos and volatility. Thirdly, R2P was the discourse of choice in debating how best to respond to the Libya crisis. But the R2P consensus underpinning Resolution 1973 in 2011 was damaged by gaps in expectation, communication and accountability between those who mandated the operation and those who executed it. For NATO, the military operations, once begun, quickly showed up a critical gap between a no-fly zone and an effective civilian protection mandate. But back in New York, there was an unbridgeable gap between effective civilian protection, which Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (‘BRICS’) supported, and regime change, which they strongly opposed. One important result of the gaps was a split in the international response to the worsening crisis in Syria. Both China and Russia, still smarting from the over-interpretation of Resolution 1973, have been defiantly opposed to any resolution that could set in train a sequence of events leading to a 1973-type authorisation for outside military operations in Syria. Fourthly, the Libya controversy over the implementation of R2P notwithstanding, by 2012 there was no substantial opposition to R2P as a principle or norm — an international standard of conduct.
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14 Nov

[Spencer Zifcak is Allan Myers Professor of Law and Director of the Institute of Legal Studies at the Australian Catholic University.] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. My article on this subject attempts to encapsulate the standing of coercive (Pillar 3) intervention within the framework...

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14 Nov

The Melbourne Journal of International Law is delighted to continue our partnership with Opinio Juris. This week will feature three articles from Issue 13(1) of the Journal. The full issue is available for download here. Today, our discussion commences with Spencer Zifcak’s article ‘The Responsibility to Protect after Libya and Syria’. Professor Zifcak draws on the disparate responses to the humanitarian...

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