Last week, the U.S. Senate held confirmation hearings for Vice-Admiral Michael S. Rogers to replace General Keith Alexander as head of U.S. Cyber Command. It's interesting to see how both men received almost identical written questions in their respective 2014 and 2010 hearings. More interesting perhaps are the similarities and variations in their responses with respect to how international law operates...
[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.
There’s never a boring year in international law and 2013 turned out to be particularly eventful: Syria, major cases in front of national and international courts, a possible nuclear deal with Iran, and turmoil in Eastern Europe, Egypt, and South Sudan, to name but a few reasons. This post is not an attempt to log all that we have written about...
A few days ago, in response to reports of an imminent deal between P5+1 and Iran concerning Iran's uranium enrichment, Tyler Cullis and Ryan Goodman debated whether Iran has a "right" to develop nuclear power for civilian purposes. Tyler argued that Iran does, citing (inter alia) Art. IV of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT): Nothing in this Treaty...
A couple of weeks ago, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum said he was surprised that Syria has, by all accounts, voluntarily given up its chemical-weapons capability: I don't really have any comment about this, except to express a bit of puzzlement. As near as I can tell, Bashar al-Assad is really and truly sincere about destroying his chemical weapons stocks.1 But why?...
The debate over autonomous weapons is not so visible in the United States, but the ban campaign launched by Human Rights Watch a year ago - an international NGO coalition called the "Campaign to Stop Killer Robots" - has been quite active in Europe and at the UN, where a number of countries raised the issue in their statements to...
I agree with Peter that there is a move to universalize (through accretion) a norm against spying via Article 17 of the ICCPR. But unlike Peter, I think it will get nowhere. Instead, I was struck by how the German complaint against the NSA program has not really been phrased in terms of how it violates international norms or laws....
Eric Posner has a new Cassandra column at Slate, this latest one foretelling the doom of the ICC. There isn't much point in disagreeing with his basic thesis; no one knows at this point -- not him, not I -- whether the ICC will succeed. It is possible, however, to take issue with a number of assertions that Posner makes in...
Apparently not, because yesterday's war propaganda editorial by Sebastian Junger beating the drum for attacking Syria is just spectacularly awful. I've been out of the fisking game for a while, but the editorial simply can't pass unmentioned. Every war I have ever covered — Kosovo, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and Liberia — withstood all diplomatic efforts to end it until Western military action...