Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

...justice scholarship already, including Sarah Nouwen’s book Complementary in the Line of Fire, Carsten Stahn and Mohamed El Zeidy’s edited volume The International Criminal Court and Complementarity, and articles by Kevin Jon Heller (see here and here) and William Schabas. De Vos’s book ultimately succeeds in this endeavour by grounding his engagement with the question of complementarity in a novel perspective, namely, by examining the multiple socially constructed meanings of complementarity and their respective implications for building domestic criminal justice systems. The goal of this brief contribution to the symposium...

...Study of Humanitarian Law , Royal University of Law and Economics since 2017, whose research concerns the transitional justice process in Cambodia, including victim participation and genocide education of the young generation. Julie Bernath is a senior researcher at swisspeace and the University of Basel, whose book ‘The Khmer Rouge Tribunal: Power, Politics and Resistance in Transitional Justice’, will be published in 2023 with The Wisconsin University Press.] On 22 September 2022, 150 civil parties attended the final hearing of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which...

Transitional Justice in Ethiopia. After a series of consultations with diverse stakeholders, the working group released its 270-page report comprised of different policy recommendations. Following very limited and hurriedly conducted validation workshops, the MoJ tabled a draft TJ policy for the council of ministers to be adopted. In April 2024, the Ethiopian government adopted its long-awaited National Transitional Justice policy which marks a significant breakthrough in the country’s journey towards justice, healing and reconciliation. Following the adoption of the policy, the MoJ prepared an implementation roadmap to advance the process...

[Agatha Verdebout is a Senior Researcher at Groupe de recherche et d’information sur la paix et la sécurité (GRIP).] I would like to start by thanking all the contributors for taking the time to read and review the book, as well as Alexandra Hofer and Opinio Juris for their interest in my work and the effort they have put into organising this written symposium. I am grateful for their comments, suggestions, questions and invitations to elaborate on some of the claims I make in Rewriting Histories.  Reading the reviews confirmed...

...reason that we invited a few scholars and practitioners to reflect on the themes covered by the book. We also invited Oumar Ba to respond to the observations of the contributors. We are very grateful to the contributors and to Oumar Ba for participating in this symposium despite the very disruptive effect that the global COVID-19 pandemic has had on professional and personal lives. We are also grateful to OpinioJuris for hosting this symposium. We hope that this symposium will stimulate enriching reflections on the themes covered by the book....

...dynamics, the Court has unwittingly become enmeshed in national and regional politics. Clark concludes that, although the ICC describes its work in terms of complementarity between international and national justice responses to atrocity crimes, the ICC’s fundamental distance from African societies has produced negative effects both for the Court and the countries where it intervenes. We have invited several scholars and practitioners to discuss Phil Clark’s arguments and conclusions. Their contributions will be followed by the author’s response. We are grateful to Opinio Juris for hosting this symposium. Phil Clark...

To close the symposium, Diego García Sayán, Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, will reflect on the importance of having women in the judiciary, while Viviana Krsticevic, member of GQUAL, will note how the current moment represents an opportunity to achieve gender parity in international justice. Conclusion When GQUAL was launched, we did not envision that its objectives could not be met in an initial period of five years. Yet, women are still not participating in the decision-making processes of international justice on equal terms. We still...

[ Alix Vuillemin is the Executive Director of Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice. Rosemary Grey is a Senior Lecturer at Sydney Law School, The University of Sydney.] This post forms part of the Opinio Juris Symposium on Reproductive Violence in International Law, in which diverse authors reflect on how the International Criminal Court and other jurisdictions have responded to violations of reproductive health and reproductive autonomy. The symposium complements a one-day conference to be held on 11 June 2024,  in which legal practitioners, scholars, activists, and survivors will meet in The...

cohabitants. This much is clear from Nuremberg, and even more so, the contemporaneous Far East tribunals, the combination of which are the template for today’s institutions of international justice. These tribunals are rightly celebrated for their revolutionary role in bringing the purveyors of mass atrocity to justice, and rightly criticized as victor’s justice, ex post facto justice, and racist (especially the Far East cases). Nuremberg’s primary lesson and legacy is of accountability. But its flaws also constituted a teaching moment in the drive toward fairness.  Established a half century later,...

...to a miscarriage of justice for the victims of these “phantom” crimes. The decision of the Appeals Chamber has been commented upon and dissected on various themes including that its arguably gendered assessment of questions of liability increases “the risk of impunity for SGBV crimes.” It is in Darryl Robinson’s book, Justice in Extreme Cases, that we get a glimpse of a different basis of analysis – that of the encounter between criminal law theory and international criminal law. Specifically, Robinson explores the deontic constraints of a system of justice...

place after the end of the Second World War, international criminal justice has been associated with ‘victor’s justice’. Proponents of ICL have for long struggled to demonstrate that the discipline is more than power politics disguised under the depoliticised image of the liberal trial. It is often argued that ICL has come a long way since its early days and that the ‘progressive internalization’ of the norms of international criminal justice in the international arena is an incremental, rather than a rapid process. Consequently, one is left with the perception...

administrative architecture of international criminal justice and explore an active and direct role for regional inter-governmental organisations (RIGOs). This requires rethinking the field’s approach and ‘de-globalising’ international justice. While there is quite some commentary on regionalisation of international justice (see for example Jalloh and Burke-White), the role of RIGOs remains underexplored. A Shifting Playground? Accountability for international crimes has, so far, been administered either nationally by states or globally by international mechanisms. In both instances, the primary administrative actors have been: directly affected states, with or without support from inter-governmental...