Search: Affective Justice: Book Symposium: A Response
03 Nov Don’t Forget the Black-and-White Jumpsuit with the Words “Convict” on It
...to doing? "Can we, as civilized nations, really afford to sacrifice justice to expediency?" No. But can we, as relatively civilized peoples and nations really afford to sacrifice both justice and expediency on the altar of the accused's right to defend themselves, like what happened with the Milosevic trial? And if forced to chose, which one harms justice the less? That is the dilemma, and it is not one for us to find a concrete answer to, but at some point, we have to make a values call, and bluntly...09 Feb Is International Law International? Continuing the Conversation
prior to many other projects: my book “strips away preconceptions and mystification” with a view to setting the scene for social justice projects and instrumental and empirical analyses. For instance, although the book engages in some empirical analysis, it doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive or a champion of sophisticated methods. Similarly, the book describes and explains international law and lawyers’ fragmented reality but does not take the next step of providing a normative framework for assessing which approaches are better or worse. Good scholarship is often completed in layers. As...
07 Aug Doing Justice to History Symposium: Expressivism and “The Struggle for Historical Justice”
[Kirsten J. Fisher is Associate Professor of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.] Barrie Sander’s Doing Justice to History: Confronting the Past in International Criminal Courts is a significant piece of work on the way history is constructed through contestation in courtrooms and the judgements rendered from those proceedings. While there is much to say about this work, I will focus my thoughts on what this book contributes to the expressivist literature on international criminal law. Not unintentionally, this is an important work for those of us who...
02 Oct Distant Justice Symposium: Measuring Distances—A Response to the Book “Distant Justice” by Phil Clark
[Xabier Agirre Aranburu is Head of the Investigative Analysis Section at the Investigations Division of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. The views expressed herein are those of the author alone, and do not reflect the views of the Office of the Prosecutor. This is the latest post in our symposium on Phil Clark’s book , Distant Justice: The Impact of the International Criminal Court on African Politics.] Phil Clark has written an ambitious book, attempting to address many issues across eight of the situations investigated...
14 Jul Reaction to “Can Coastal States Interrupt Foreign Passage in Their Territorial Seas in Response to Non-Compliance with Human Rights Obligations? A Response to the ASCOMARE Legal Opinion”
...on Opinio Juris on 1 May 2025—entitled “ Can Coastal States Interrupt Foreign Passage in Their Territorial Seas in Response to Non-Compliance with Human Rights Obligations? A Response to the ASCOMARE Legal Opinion ” (‘the Response’)—warrant clarification. In particular, several interpretations drawn from the Opinion appear to oversimplify complex legal arguments and to assess specific points in isolation from the broader legal and factual context that justified the issuance of the Opinion. This appears already from the response’s introductory remarks, which question the Opinion’s conclusion that the passage of vessels...
07 Mar Seychelles, the United States, and Transitional Justice: Big Lessons from Little Countries
states with experience deploying transitional justice processes to address the repressive policies and practices of the past. The United States is not a complete stranger to transitional justice, although these mechanisms have been more often employed at the local level or to address discrete incidents and injustices. A quick look at history points to the various circumstances in which transitional justice mechanisms have already been employed in the U.S.: the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to address the separation of Native children from their families as...08 Jun Guest Post: International Criminal Justice and Reconciliation: Beyond the Retributive vs. Restorative Divide (Part 1 of 2)
approaches are per se better suited to achieve reconciliation than retributive mechanisms. I will then explore certain means to improve the connection between international criminal justice and reconciliation. 1. Links between Reconciliation and Retributive Justice Retributive justice mechanisms, such as international criminal courts and tribunals, are often criticized for their limitations, namely their emphasis on perpetrators, their individualization of guilt and focus on the past, and their risks. This includes detachment from local context and emphasis on universal justice models and standards. Restorative mechanisms of justice, including victim-centred and less...02 Aug Why the Failure to Provide Saif with Due Process Is Relevant to Libya’s Admissibility Challenge
...the way justice is used in Arts. 53 and 55) as context, object and purpose that informs the ordinary meaning to be accorded to "justice" in 17(2)(c). If it goes that route, then justice must mean a kind of justice that will guarantee the rights of the accused and foster lasting respect for international justice. In other words, it could use it to permit the ICC to proceed with the Saif Gaddafi case if it finds that the Libyan prosecution is a kangaroo court that does not comply with minimum...
25 Aug Symposium on The Sentimental Life of International Law: Reviewing the Reviews
blowing up the pipeline, someone reading Thomas Bernhard, someone madly theorizing. The book inhabits a few of these personae (or the personae inhabit the book) and both Isobel and Zina get to the nub of it when they say that the book is about the “life lived” or the lived lives of international lawyers. [The other nub is there in Simon Stern’s disentangling of my foray into 18th century sentimental literature where he describes my book as “an incitement to think more seriously about the formal aspects of international law’s...
11 Aug Doing Justice to History Symposium: On Plurality and Ideology
to judge a book by its cover, I 100% pre-emptively decide I like a book if it has (what I consider) a good title and Sander’s book has a very good title. It links justice and history in a way that makes the book’s subject clear, but which also makes it clear that justice and history are co-constitutive. Second, the book is ambitious. Sander works with both primary and secondary materials. He analyses pre-trial and trial documents, and judgments from six different ICCTs (IMT, IMTFE, ICTY, ICTR, SCSL and the...