Rape and Sexual Violence as Torture and Genocide in the Decisions of International Tribunals: Transjudicial Networks and the Development of International Criminal Law

International criminal tribunals established by the UN Security Council in the 1990s have been widely acclaimed as active participants in the modern system of dynamic criminal justice. One of their best known achievements is the prosecution of rape and sexual assaults. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) set an example for other tribunals to follow. By interpreting a variety of international laws, the community of international legal professionals has been able to shift the prevailing understanding of rape and sexual violence away from that of an “unfortunate byproducts of war.” Not only has the epistemic community of legal professionals been able to end impunity for these crimes, but case-law of international tribunals has become a basis for subsequent trials at quasi-international tribunals. Decisions of the tribunals have been instrumental in drafting the Statute of the International Criminal Court and can be regarded as an example of the formation of new international norms by means of judicial decisions.     

The Variety of Language Signs in Legal Terminology: Linguistic and Extra-Linguistic Background

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The article deals with diversity of language signs in legal terminology. The aim of the article...     

Proofing the Ban on `Witness Proofing’: Did the ICC Get it Right?

This paper focuses on the reasons for disaccord between the ICC and the more seasoned international criminal tribunals on the issue of allowing substantive preparation of witnesses for testifying in court. The rationales behind the opposing decisions and the ensuing debate on the legitimacy and utility of witness proofing continue to be overshadowed by competition between the ?adversarial’ and the ?inquisitorial’ ideologies unfolding in the guise of policy rhetoric. The ban on witness proofing imposed by both Pre-Trial Chamber I and Trial Chamber I of the ICC is based on a stringent application of Article 21 and the evidentiary regime in which the Court's discretion to elect the applicable rules of evidence is more circumscribed than under Rule 89 (B) of its counterparts. Although the ICC trial scheme is rather obscure, attempts to read the possibility of witness proofing into it may well reveal that the practice would be an extraneous element in the ICC procedural system characterized by a different configuration of the truth-finding mandate that eschews the concept of partisan ownership of witnesses. The antipodal judicial stances on witness preparation stem from the substantial dissimilarities between the two models of international criminal procedure, and each of them may be defended both legally and in policy terms. While there is little chance of attenuating the fragmentation of international criminal practice in this area, the ICC’s dissent may have had positive systemic effects insofar as it emphasizes the independent value of witness familiarization and the need for enhanced judicial control over witness contact.     

The urban household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900–2000: Patterns of family formation in a turbulent century

Starting from census data on co-residence and household composition, the authors analyse principles of family organisation and family formation in twentieth-century urban Russia and the Soviet Union. The article uses an adapted version of the classification of households developed by Peter Laslett and Eugene Hammel to study variation in household structure for successive population censuses. Changes in this variation between cross-sections are explained with the help of additional quantitative and qualitative data and are linked to the fundamental demographic, social and economic shifts which took place in Russian society in the course of the twentieth century. The article finds a family system characterised by a tendency towards nuclear family formation, but incorporating a fairly stable element of household extension. Co-residence of three generations was both an answer to a perennial housing problem and offered important advantages in the sphere of childcare and care for the elderly. Variation and fluctuation in household structure are found to be most pronounced during the turbulent first half of the century. After a period of stability during the post-war decades of Soviet rule, post-Soviet transformations provoke new changes.     

Robust Shoeprint Retrieval Method Based on Local‐to‐Global Feature Matching for Real Crime Scenes

In this study, an automatic and robust crime scene shoeprint retrieval method is proposed. As most shoeprints left at crime scenes are randomly partial and noisy, crime scene shoeprint retrieval is a challenging task. To handle partial, noisy shoeprint images, we employ denoising deep belief network (DBN) to extract local features and use spatial pyramid matching (SPM) to obtain a local‐to‐global matching score. In this study, 536 query shoeprint images from crime scenes and a large scale database containing 34,768 shoeprint images are used to evaluate the retrieval performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other state‐of‐the‐art methods in terms of retrieval accuracy, feature dimension, and retrieval speed. The proposed method achieves a cumulative match score (CMS) of 65.67% at top 10 which is 5.60% higher than the second best performing method.     

The Most and the Least International: The City and the Countryside in Azerbaijan and Armenia from the Early 1960s to January 1990

Abstract

The essay examines the effects of Soviet nationalities policy on Armenians living in Baku, the capital of the Azerbaijani SSR, and on ethnic Azerbaijanis in Kyzyl-Shafag, an Azerbaijani village in the Armenian SSR. A series of interviews were conducted with members of these two communities to explore some of the results of Soviet nationalities policy. Although the residents of Baku emphasised the multinational character of the city, they nevertheless conceded that ethnicity played an important role in their lives, even at the level of everyday practices. The same also applies for the Azerbaijanis in the far less cosmopolitan Armenian countryside, where ethnic boundaries remained largely impenetrable. Soviet language, with its essentialist categories that separated people into internally homogeneous groups, could not have been more appropriate for this purpose.