The International Criminal Court and Mali: Towards More Transparency in International Criminal Law Investigations?

The author takes a closer look at the Situation in Mali and the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP)’s initiation of full investigations on the basis of article 53(1) ICC Statute. In accordance with OTP Regulation 29(1), the OTP produces so-called ‘article 53’ reports that analyze the legal position in conflict situations that are under pre-investigation against the background of the following legal criteria: jurisdiction; admissibility; and the interest of justice. These reports give an analytical basis for the Chief Prosecutor to render a positive or negative decision on whether a certain conflict reaches the level of formal criminal investigations. In Mali, the Chief Prosecutor took the fast lane, passing by several other situations that have been under pre-investigation for a longer period of time. To a certain extent, as will be outlined in this contribution, this can be explained by the self-referral mechanism and certain particularities in Mali. However, some selective choices remain the OTP’s mystery, covert due to the nebulosity of ‘gravity’.     

Protection of Property Rights by both International Human Rights Law ＆ Contracting States＇ Domestic Law and Its Enlightenment to China

通过对联合国框架下的人权条约、各区域人权条约以及主要缔约国在外国人财产权保障方面的规定和做法进行研究,可知联合国人权条约对一般意义上个人（包括外国人）财产权的保护程度明显偏弱,各区域人权公约对财产权的保护则各有侧重,各缔约国对外国人的财产普遍有一定限制。其中有不少是我国在外国人财产权方面制定和适用法律、规则可借鉴的做法。     

Do Victims of War Need International Law? Human Rights Education Programs in Authoritarian Sudan

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Sudan, this article illuminates the consequences of human rights educational workshops as a form of humanitarian assistance in war‐ravaged areas. These projects are built on flawed assumptions about Sudanese politics and about the likelihood that human rights education empowers the war‐ravaged poor. The beneficial impacts of human rights discourse stem from its side effects, which fulfill urgent and symbolic needs, and not from the core content of human rights. The case of an authoritarian regime exposes an alternative site of rights promotion, outside the established or struggling democracies where most literature on rights resides. Bridging the literature on rights in Western, democratic contexts and on human rights in Africa, this article argues that law is not enough—and is potentially dangerous—in the insecure and impoverished areas where the international aid community has been encouraging it to flourish.     

The Crisis of International Criminal Law in Africa: A Regional Regime in Response?

Netherlands International Law Review - This article considers the African Union’s (AU) proposal for a regional court for international crimes under the Malabo Protocol 2014 (Protocol). It...     

Clarifying Maritime Criminal Cases Jurisdiction and its International Implications—Current Legal Developments in China

Crime, Law and Social Change - On 20 February 2020, the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the China Coast Guard jointly issued the Notice on Issues...     

“Error But Without Malice” in Defamation of Public Officials: The Value of Free Expression in International Human Rights Law

Government officials in various parts of the world use defamation to silence critics, but defamation liability may curtail freedom of expression on topics of public interest and undermine human rights generally. Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees freedom of expression unless a state can show need to protect individual reputation and acts proportionally. In its adjudication of complaints for violations of Article 19, and in its General Comment 34, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has crafted the principle that defamation liability may not be imposed if an erroneous statement about a public official was made in “error but without malice.” Although soft law, General Comment 34 represents the committee's most compelling articulation of the values animating freedom of expression in international human rights law, and chief among the values is the role played by free expression to promote realization of all human rights.     

Amendment Of China＇s Criminal Procedure Law Highlights Human Rights Protection：on Privilege Against Self- Incrimination and Exclusionary Rule

此次我国《刑事诉讼法》修改,规定了不得强迫任何人证实自己有罪,还增加了非法证据排除的规定。这些新增内容之间存在紧密联系,每一项又有各自的意义。“不强迫自证其罪”条款是“尊重和保障人权”的进一步体现,关系到我国刑事侦查、检察和司法部门的职责和个人权利的保障;非法证据排除是落实不强迫自证其罪的具体措施,通过约束侦查部门取证行为对侵犯个人权利提供了补救措施。这些都是我国《刑事诉讼法》在原则性和制度方面的重大修改。文章详细研究了新增加的这些条款的确切含义,指出其中的进步意义,分析了存在的问题,提出执行新增加的这些法律条文必须注意的事项。     

Criminal Law, the Victim and Community: The Shades of ‘We’ and the Conceptual Involvement of Community in Contemporary Criminal Law Theory

The article addresses the argument, put forward by Lernestedt, that the proprietor of the ‘criminal-law conflict’ is the community (or the community and the offender) and discusses his proposed theoretical model of criminal law trial. I raise questions regarding the legitimacy of such a model, focusing on four counts. Firstly, I assert that his assumptions about the state the individual and the old/new versions of criminal law theory are society-dependent. Secondly, I address some problems with the concept of community and particularly with the proposed conception of community, which seems to mostly exclude the offender. Thirdly, I question the need for (or added value of) such a proposed conceptual involvement of the community as an actor in the criminal law process and theory. Lastly, some potential problems with the idea of the victim as a mere “representative of us” are mentioned, including the possibly undesirable demands and limitations on the victim’s agency and issues of respect for the victim’s individuality.     

Law Enforcement and the Rights of the Accused: Are the Police Getting a Bad Rap?

Nationwide, law enforcement professionals have endured increasing scrutiny regarding their treatment of custodial suspects and their alleged abridgement of suspects’ Constitutional rights. At the same time, in the interests of community safety, many members of the public fully expect police officers to function efficiently in arresting and facilitating the prosecution of likely perpetrators. These perspectives reflect due-process and crime-control models respectively. Very little is known, however, about how law enforcement professionals actually view the rights of the accused when not acutely immersed in the cross-currents of public opinion. Using an anonymous survey, the current investigation addresses both Miranda rights as well as the European Union’s (EU) much more comprehensive approach to the rights of the accused. In general, this sample of 209 urban police officers favored protections of criminal suspects that went considerably beyond Miranda safeguards.     

Are We Human? Edgework in Defiance of the Mundane and Measurable

Edgework can be a useful heuristic tool in producing counter-statements about Orthodox Criminology, where the measurable has arguably become more important than the meaningful. This paper focuses on the embodied experiential nexus of culture and crime in which criminology is taught, administered, and investigated. The Burkean framework of Dramatism is used to reveal how collective creative productions by students can provide insight into the political context of the contemporary criminology classroom. Through an analysis of instant ethnographies penned by participants of a flash mob I illustrate how the role of autonomy and responsibility are not resources that students readily draw upon to understand themselves in relation to the production of knowledge and social change. These observations support some of the concerns raised by Cultural Criminologist about the rise of administrative criminology. In the spirit of detournement, I argue that one way to facilitate student engagement with knowledge production differently is to invite them to experience moments of embodied transgressions.     

Review of Findlay Stark,Culpable Carelessness: Recklessness and Negligence in the Criminal Law

This book review sketches the main arguments of Findlay Stark’s book, and then goes on to develop an objection to Stark’s account of one of the core notions in the book—namely, awareness of risk.     

European Human Rights Law and the Normalisation of the ‘Closed Material Procedure’: Limit or Source?

Once a legal abnormality that was criticised on human rights grounds, the closed material procedure (CMP) has now become the main mechanism for dealing with allegedly sensitive security information in the UK. This article considers the role of European human rights law in that process. It argues that the CMP can be conceptualised as the product of human rights law, which has developed so as to legalise and normalise its use, and that this process is symptomatic of a deeper inter‐relationship between human rights law and the preservation of states' security interests, which renders the former inherently unsuitable for dealing with security phenomena.     

The Uses of the Outputs of the International Law Commission in International Adjudication: Subsidiary Means or Artefacts of Rules?

This paper examines the methods which international courts and tribunals (ICTs) employ when using ILC outputs for the purpose of determining rules of international law and their content. Specifically, it identifies common patterns in the ways in which ICTs, first, justify their reliance on ILC outputs and, second, deal with their ambiguities. The paper argues in favour of a consistent methodology for the treatment of ILC outputs in international adjudication. Such a framework is based on the distinction between the identification of the status of a normative proposition contained in these texts and the determination of its content or its interpretation. The identification of the status of a normative proposition requires a critical assessment and reconstruction of the evidence leading up to its development taking also into account that these instruments are not a monolith from the perspective of sources. However, the interpretation of a proposition whose status is uncontested follows a line of inquiry akin to treaty interpretation. This observation has broader implications for the process of interpretation in international law. Specifically, apart from the context of treaty interpretation, international courts or tribunals interpret the normative propositions contained in ILC outputs as a methodological shortcut for the interpretation of rules of customary international law or general principles of law. Conversely, the employment of methods akin to treaty interpretation in this context can constitute evidence of the emergence of common rules, principles, or good practices of interpretation that are also applicable to unwritten international law.

     

New Paths in International Criminal Justice?: The Internal Rules of the Cambodian Extraordinary Chambers

The Internal Rules of the Cambodian Extraordinary Chambers adoptedin June 2007 provide some insight into how a non-adversarialsystem might work in the context of a hybrid tribunal with jurisdictionover both domestic and international crimes. This approach presentsvarious novelties, especially with respect to the pre-trialand trial stages of the proceedings, and provides an exampleof integration into a domestic non-adversarial system of principlesderived from international criminal procedure.