International Criminal Law

LJIL Symposium: James Stewart Responds to Jens Ohlin

[James G. Stewart is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia] Jens Ohlin, with George Fletcher and in his own right, has been a pioneer in bringing criminal theory to bear on international criminal justice. His earlier work warned us that our dogmatic insistence on ascertaining international criminal law in pre-existing sources of public international law risked undermining the inherently criminal nature of this adjudicative process and the fundamental notions of criminal law that must apply as a consequence. As is the case with the other critics who have written for this blog, my article is counterfactually dependent on his earlier groundbreaking work. I think it appropriate to start by placing Ohlin’s comments in context. His admirable defense of the differentiated model of blame attribution presently in place in international criminal justice does not take into account that arguably the most prominent theorists even within his own jurisdiction, from Michael Moore to Sandy Kadish and Larry Alexander, all view complicity as conceptually superfluous. This does not respond in any way to Ohlin’s comments, but I do think it important to table the growing body of authoritative academic argument against the differentiated model international courts have unquestioningly absorbed. In many respects, my article is an attempt to do just that. On another preliminary note, I fear that Ohlin’s criticisms might miss the real essence of the paper. Most importantly, he does not address the normative substance of “modes of liability” in international criminal justice. Both the title to his response (“Names, Labels, and Roses”), and the content of his remarks under that heading imply that the issue is just one of nomenclature, as if there were no normative significance to convicting someone of genocide for recklessly assisting the crime. But the major argument in my paper is that in its extremities, complicity violates the same standards that commentators have used to criticize the overreach of other “modes of liability” within the discipline, and that consequently, this mode of liability too is sometimes unjustifiably harsh or simply unprincipled.

LJIL Symposium: Names, Labels, and Roses

[Jens David Ohlin is Associate Professor of Law at Cornell Law School; he blogs at LieberCode] In his excellent essay, James Stewart advocates for a unitary model of perpetration. To the extent that this means the end of modes of liability, so be it says Stewart. We don’t need them. They codify distinctions that we don’t need, promote confusion over coherence, and so we should instead streamline the centrifugal doctrines into a single account of causal contribution. On the elegance scale, Stewart’s proposal should score a 10 from most judges. Stewart pitches his account as revisionary, an attempt to right the ship after years of confusing scholarly and judicial debate about modes of liability and the difference between principals and accessories (or other categories that occupy similar conceptual space). But I think that it is the wrong light in which to see the argument. I see Stewart’s proposal as urging return to a substantially similar state of affairs under the original Joint Criminal Enterprise scheme proposed by the Tadic Appeals Chamber during the early days of the ICTY. Cassese was the prime mover behind the JCE doctrine, and it covered all members of the collective endeavor, regardless of their level of contribution. Eventually, the doctrine was modified to require a heightened contribution requirement, and eventually the leadership level defendants were “de-linked” from the foot soldiers and placed in separate JCEs. But the important point is that the original JCE doctrine included everyone from an architect of the crime (mastermind or hintermann) as well as the foot soldiers or what the later ICTY cases often referred to as the Relevant Physical Perpetrators, or RPP. So under the original JCE doctrine, each member of the group was prosecuted for participating in the JCE. That was, in essence, a unitary model of perpetration. True, as a formal matter, aiding and abetting and accomplice liability survived the creation of JCE, but their relevance and practical import was greatly reduced. Most defendants at the ICTY were prosecuted under a JCE theory and it seemed to me that in most cases JCE could have replaced the other modes of liability given the collective nature of international crimes.

LJIL Symposium: James Stewart Responds to Thomas Weigend

[James G. Stewart is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia] I start my reaction to Thomas Weigend’s comments by insisting on my great gratitude to him. In his earlier comments on a draft of this article, he offered criticisms that were far more extensive that those he gently revealed in this blog (or that I have ever received for an article before). Although my final piece does not adequately respond to all his misgivings, I confess that I may have learned at least as much from his extensive criticisms as I did from the voluminous literature required to write this. In acknowledging his great intellectual generosity, let me nonetheless offer some response to portions of his criticism. Professor Weigend starts by suggesting that the “way out” offered by a unitary theory of perpetration is intuitively compelling because of its simplicity. What law student, attorney or judge would disagree, he asks, would deny that these differentiated modes of liability are really not easy? Here, I fear that he perhaps inadvertently reduces my argument to a mere distaste for complexity. But my goal is not simplicity for simplicity’s sake—I am also minded to ensure that international modes of liability consistently respect culpability, to halt the fractured development of modes of liability internationally from one fad to another and to suggest a means of unifying standards of blame attribution across the many jurisdictions that can prosecute these crimes.

LJIL Symposium: Thomas Weigend comments on James Stewart’s “The End of ‘Modes of Liability’ for International Crimes”

[Thomas Weigend is Professor of International and Criminal Law at the University of Cologne] In his elegantly written and profound article, James Stewart argues in favor of abandoning, in international criminal law, the traditional distinction between perpetratorship and complicity. He favors a unitary solution: every person who substantially contributes to the commission of an international offense should simply be convicted of that crime, with individual differences as to the degree of responsibility to be taken into consideration only at the sentencing stage. Stewart’s proposal will immediately appeal to any lawyer who has ever ploughed through the intricacies of the distinction among several modes of liability, be it under domestic or international criminal law. The lives of judges, advocates and law students alike would be easier if they did not have to worry about the fine lines between aiding and committing, or between instigating another person to commit a crime and using that person as an (“innocent”?) agent. With regard to the law of complicity, it is not difficult to find examples of contradictions and inconsistencies in the jurisprudence of international criminal tribunals, and Stewart points them out with wit and precision. I fully concur with this part of the author’s analysis. For example, the fact that some legal systems require a “substantive contribution” for aiding and abetting clearly is a red herring invented for the purpose of allowing judges some leeway in assessing the criminal liability of persons who are marginally involved in the “core” crime. Depending on the way one interprets this concept, “substantive contribution” can mean a little less or a little more than providing a sine qua non contribution to the actus reus. Likewise, the contested issue of whether an accomplice can act with a lesser degree of mens rea than the perpetrator leads to intractable quandaries: Isn’t it unfair to hold A liable for complicity in a special intent crime when he lacks that special intent? But why, on the other hand, should B who knowingly helps a perpetrator of genocide go unpunished just because B does not act with genocidal intent? Much of this has to do with the mess that international criminal law has made of mens rea, but it remains true that the distinctions of various levels of liability (and the cracks between them) lead to particularly unconvincing results in the area of complicity.