Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response

assistance to ensure accountability for the heinous crimes committed post the 1996 Abidjan Accord. In this period of seeming global retreat in international criminal justice in the continuum of “tribunal fatigue” in the UN system, it is useful to reflect on the remarkable desire of the Government of Sierra Leone for “credible justice” to punish adversaries, a framing which allowed the SCSL to move away from the hitherto victors’ justice archetype of ICL. The motivation for credible justice laid the foundation for the credible contributions of the SCSL to international...

...traditional justice, which is more compensatory than a retributive system,” he said on a visit to London. “That is what we have agreed at the request of the local community. They have been mainly tormenting people in one area and it is that community which asked us to use traditional justice.” It is, if course, tempting to reply to this bait-and-switch by saying “so what?” If ordinary Ugandans believe that peace through traditional justice is more important than punishing the LRA for its many crimes, isn’t that their right? Maybe...

[Michael A. Newton is Professor of the Practice of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School] The Kony 2012 campaign had the laudable goal of increasing public awareness in order to aid the search for justice and accountability in the wake of LRA atrocities. In fact, the worldwide attention had the paradoxical effect of demonstrating the lamentable reality that the optimal pathway towards authentic justice for LRA victims in that setting is neither simple nor self-obvious. This is true for a number of reasons which I shall summarize. Firstly, the complexity of...

...to the CAO’s recommendations, national proceedings would not have been needed. But where justice is denied within the institutional legal order, considerations around the perceived independence of an organisation continue to trump the individual right to access justice generally, and a fair trial specifically. It is most unfortunate that international organisations such as the IFC who purport to deliver ‘lasting solutions for development’ choose to engage in conduct that leads to grave denials of justice to already vulnerable people who ought to be the very beneficiaries of their development activity....

should be clear as to the nature of social and political justice and how these relate, say, to criminal justice. Perhaps forgoing retributive justice has a corrosive effect on social and political justice (or even 'legal' or 'ethical' justice; I'm assuming that, in the end, there's more than family resemblance to the various kinds of justice). In any case, I'm grateful to Professor Weinberger for making me think more carefully about what is at stake here. Seamus I should have also said, in fairness to Professor Ku, that we're still...

Our own Peggy McGuiness has just published an article in the Missouri Law Review on “The Internationalism of Justice Blackmun.” When an international scholar thinks of Justice Blackmun a few cases quickly come to mind: Mitsubishi v. Soler, Aerospatiale, Sale, Goldwater, etc. But as McGuiness outlines, his impact on internationalism is far greater than a few odd cases. It also includes nurturing the likes of Harold Koh and Donald Donovan, and authoring a seminal article that has proved instrumental in launching the current rage of reliance on foreign authority in...

on research I conducted as part of the Asia Justice Coalition’s Women in International Justice & Accountability (WIJA) project. The WIJA project aims to empower women leaders in Asia and develop their leadership in international law. I examined the gender and regional representation of judges at four international courts and tribunals. I focused on judges because they optically hold the most important role in courts and are the ‘face’ of judicial work. Given their impartial and representative mandate, judges should ideally represent the global character of international justice. Practically, data...

...Rights Institute; Chair, Commission on International Justice and Accountability; former US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice (2009-2015). Sareta Ashraph  is a Visiting Fellow of Practice with the Oxford Programme on International Peace and Security, Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC), Oxford Blavatnik School of Government; she is a barrister with Garden Court Chambers; and the Co-Vice Chair of the IBA War Crimes Committee] [This blog post describes new research being carried out at the University of Oxford around the question of whether some form of permanent support –...

...on paper only in the form of the Protocol on the Statue of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights and the subsequent 2014 Draft Protocol on Amendments to the Protocol on the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights. Read through this second Draft Protocol and there emerges details of a mega-court that would subsume the current African Court on Human and Peoples’ Right which would then exist as a “Human and Peoples’ Rights Section”, alongside a “General Affairs” section and an “International Criminal Law”...

[ Steve Charnovitz is an associate professor of law at The George Washington University Law School. He blogs at the International Economic Law and Policy Blog .] On October 31, 2008, I made a presentation at the ASIL’s Tillar House of a proposal for an “International Court of Justice Decisions Implementation Act.” My proposal is an outgrowth of my essay in the Agora of the July 2008 issue of the American Journal of International Law. The Agora focuses on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in “Medellin v. Texas” and includes...

I am just now beginning to make my way through the Iraq Study Group report issued today. I wanted to raise one small but interesting issue relating to Justice O’Connor’s service on the study group. We all know various historical examples in which a sitting or former justice served an important political function (John Jay, Robert Jackson, Earl Warren, etc.). But it seems this is one of the few instances in recent memory in which a former Supreme Court justice is part of a team giving political advice to the...

...petty offences, or placing the children in closed institutions in such a young age. A system which does not allow for diversion based on restorative justice principles, such as settlement or withdrawal of the proceedings is clearly destined to devastate or at least highly negatively impact children’s lives. To reflect the Article 40 of the CRC and the CRC Committee’s  recent General Comment No 24 on children’s rights in the child justice system, the common and ultimate objective for all professionals in the justice system should be to support the...