In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

16 Nov

[Mary Crock is Professor of Public Law at the University of Sydney] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Although Australia identifies as a member of the United Nation’s ‘Western European and Others’ Group (‘WEOG’), it has now enacted laws that place it much more comfortably as an Asian nation. Unlike the WEOG countries, few Asian nations are party to the Refugee Convention (‘Convention’), or to any of the major human rights conventions other than the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Most countries in this region understand and (generally) conform with the non-refoulement obligation enshrined in s 33 of the Convention, but they will not entertain the notion that refugees on their territories enjoy any economic or social rights. The presence of refugees is tolerated at best. At worst they are treated as ‘simple’ illegal migrants and subjected to detention, harassment and discrimination. Relying on the recommendations of a committee that notably did not include anyone with legal expertise, the Labor government has now moved to create a regime that Associate Professor Foster demonstrates is decidedly un-WEOG. It is squarely at odds with all but the most basic tenets of refugee and human rights law. Non-refoulement is the only principle of refugee law acknowledged in express terms. It is a regime that reifies the people in respect of whom the non-refoulement obligation is owed by denying in language that asylum seekers have any rights or agency in the protection process. The protection of affected refugees has become a privilege to be granted at the absolute (non-reviewable and non-compellable) discretion of the Minister for Immigration.
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16 Nov

[Dr Michelle Foster is an Associate Professor and Director of the International Refugee Law Research Programme in the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the Melbourne Law School.] This post is part of the MJIL 13(1) Symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. The need for international co-operation to address the challenge of refugee flows is uncontroversial in principle: it is recognised in the Preamble to the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (‘Refugee Convention’), in regional refugee treaties and in the work of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). However, too often states have relied on the notion of international co-operation to engage in what is more accurately understood as burden-shifting rather than burden-sharing arrangements. In my article I argue that while the Refugee Convention does not explicitly authorise nor prohibit the transfer of refugees between states party to the Convention, it imposes limits on the extent to which states may lawfully engage in responsibility sharing regimes. Drawing in particular on the High Court of Australia’s decision in M70/2011 v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship (‘M70’), I outline the content of the constraints imposed at international law, including the need for all parties to an arrangement to be Refugee Convention parties, and the obligation on a transferring state to ensure that non-refoulement will be respected, which in turn requires that the receiving state has an adjudication procedure in place to assess refugee status, that the receiving state guarantees access to that system, and that the receiving state interprets the Refugee Convention in a manner that respects the ‘true and autonomous’ meaning of the refugee definition contained in art 1A(2) of the Refugee Convention. In addition, those rights already acquired by a refugee by virtue of physical presence in the sending state (for example rights to education, religious freedom, and access to the courts) must be respected in the receiving state. Since publication of this article, the Australian government has moved swiftly to implement the ‘disincentives … to actively discourage irregular and dangerous maritime voyages to Australia for the purposes of claiming protection or seeking asylum’ recommended by its Expert Panel in August 2012. In order to do so it was necessary to amend the Migration Act 1958 (‘Migration Act’) to remove the protections which the High Court relied upon in M70 to invalidate the declaration concerning Malaysia. In my view the amendments to the Migration Act effected by passage of the Migration Legislation Amendment (Regional Processing and Other Measures) Act 2012 (‘Act’), and the subsequent transfer of putative refugees from Australia to Nauru, place Australia at risk of violation of the Refugee Convention. Before outlining my core concerns I make the initial observation that while there is considerable emphasis on Nauru constituting a ‘regional processing country,’ there is nothing regional about the current arrangements. They are not implemented pursuant to a wider regional agreement (in contrast for example to the Dublin Regulation in Europe), nor do they entail any reciprocity since Nauru has no refugee intake other than that resulting from implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding (‘MOU’) with Australia.
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16 Nov

Israel has intensified its aerial bombardment on the Gaza strip, after shells targeted Tel Aviv for the first time in 20 years. CNN has a Q&A about the conflict. Syrian opposition leaders are in London to meet UK Foreign Secretary William Hague. The UK has summoned the Spanish Ambassador after Spanish naval vessels allegedly intruded in Gibraltar territorial waters. The UK Ambassador to...

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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 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

Israel has hammered the Gaza Strip in a series of airstrikes, one of which has killed Hamas' military commander Ahmad Jabari. The United Nations Population Fund has declared contraception and family planning to be a human right having a positive effect on economic development. Unlike France, the United States has stopped short of recognizing Syria's opposition coalition. Nigerian lawmakers have passed a bill criminalizing same-sex marriage. The International Monetary Fund...

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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

Everyone else has a piece of this reality show, so why not international law? It turns out that Jill Kelley (for those of you not keeping score, here's the roster) is the honorary consul of Korea in Tampa. She's now looking to use the status defensively. From USA Today: Jill Kelley, the socialite whose complaint to the FBI began the unraveling...

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