Why do international criminal tribunals write histories of the origins and causes of armed conflicts? Richard Ashby Wilson conducted research with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and expert ...witnesses in three international criminal tribunals to understand how law and history are combined in the courtroom. Historical testimony is now an integral part of international trials, with prosecutors and defense teams using background testimony to pursue decidedly legal objectives. In the Slobodan Milošević trial, the prosecution sought to demonstrate special intent to commit genocide by reference to a long-standing animus, nurtured within a nationalist mindset. For their part, the defense called historical witnesses to undermine charges of superior responsibility, and to mitigate the sentence by representing crimes as reprisals. Although legal ways of knowing are distinct from those of history, the two are effectively combined in international trials in a way that challenges us to rethink the relationship between law and history.
In 2004, the State Department gathered more than a thousand interviews from refugees in Chad that verified Colin Powell's UN and congressional testimonies about the Darfur genocide. The survey cost ...nearly a million dollars to conduct and yet it languished in the archives as the killing continued, claiming hundreds of thousands of murder and rape victims and restricting several million survivors to camps. This book fully examines that survey and its heartbreaking accounts. It documents the Sudanese government's enlistment of Arab Janjaweed militias in destroying black African communities. The central questions are: why is the United States so ambivalent to genocide? Why do so many scholars deemphasize racial aspects of genocide? How can the science of criminology advance understanding and protection against genocide? This book gives a vivid firsthand account and voice to the survivors of genocide in Darfur.
This book traces the evolution of crimes against humanity (CAH) and their application from the end of World War I to the present day, in terms of both historic legal analysis and subject-matter ...content. The first part of the book addresses general issues pertaining to the categorization of CAH in normative jurisprudential and doctrinal terms. This is followed by an analysis of the specific contents of CAH, describing its historic phases going through international criminal tribunals, mixed model tribunals and the International Criminal Court. The book examines the general parts and defenses of the crime, along with the history and jurisprudence of both international and national prosecutions. For the first time, a list of all countries that have enacted national legislation specifically directed at CAH is collected, along with all of the national prosecutions that have occurred under national legislation up to 2010.
Current discussions on the military use of artificial intelligence (AI), in particular concerning autonomous weapons systems, have largely focused on the challenges for the attribution of individual ...criminal responsibility for war crimes whenever such systems do not perform as initially intended by human operators. Yet, recent observations evidence the pressing need to shift the discussion on the responsibility gap further to include challenges raised by the intentional use of AI systems for the commission of war crimes and other international crimes. Additionally, the increasing development and use of AI systems, based on data-driven learning (DDL) methods, demands particular attention due to the difficulty these systems' lack of predictability and explainability poses in terms of anticipation of their effects. Against this background, this article complements the present discussion on the responsibility gap by discussing some concerns that the intentional use of DDL systems for the commission of international crimes raises regarding the required mental element and thus, the ascription of individual criminal responsibility. Ultimately, this article proposes preliminary avenues to address these concerns.
"This collection of original essays, edited by renowned genocide scholar, Samuel Totten, shows how the United States government repeatedly aided certain regimes as they planned and then carried out ...crimes against humanity and genocide. The cases include Indonesia, Bangladesh, Chile, East Timor, Argentina, Guatemala, and Rwanda. The goals of this book are first to inform U.S. citizens, university students, human rights activists, and anti-genocide activists why and how various United States presidential administrations responded to the perpetration of crimes against humanity and genocide by foreign nations with which it had close relations. Second, to raise awareness--particularly that of students at the university level--how certain decisions with monumental consequences made by various U.S. government officials compare and contrast with the purported ethics of the United States. Third, to encourage and prod readers to ponder whether certain actions of U.S. Government officials were reasonable or unreasonable; moral, amoral or immoral; right or wrong; and/or legal or criminal. In his Introduction, Totten offers a critical assessment of the US Foreign Policy as it pertains to genocide and crimes against humanity, and discusses the differences between those two terms--a subject that generates great debate among scholars. In the following chapters, each author presents a detailed analysis of a particular case of crimes against humanity or genocide by a foreign government against its own citizens, and discusses why and how United States Government was complicit by aiding and/or remaining silent. What makes the collection unique--and chilling--is the inclusion of actual declassified documents generated by the U.S. Government at the time. Such documents include memoranda, telegrams, letters, talking points, cables, reports, discussion papers, and situation reports. Students will see how the fate of human lives is discussed at the highest levels of government. The Appendices include the United Nations Convention on the
Foreword Florian Jessberger; Julia Geneuss
Journal of international criminal justice,
08/2023, Volume:
21, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
More than 20 years ago, on 30 June 2002, the German Code of Crimes Against International Law (CCAIL) entered into force. The anniversary completed last year, gives reason to look back and reflect ...critically on the development of German international criminal law in the last 20 years.
This book argues that accountability for extraordinary atrocity crimes should not uncritically adopt the methods and assumptions of ordinary liberal criminal law. Criminal punishment designed for ...common criminals is a response to mass atrocity and a device to promote justice in its aftermath. This book comes to this conclusion after reviewing the sentencing practices of international, national, and local courts and tribunals that punish atrocity perpetrators. Sentencing practices of these institutions fail to attain the goals that international criminal law ascribes to punishment, in particular retribution and deterrence. Fresh thinking is necessary to confront the collective nature of mass atrocity and the disturbing reality that individual membership in group-based killings is often not maladaptive or deviant behavior but, rather, adaptive or conformist behavior. This book turns to a modern, and adventurously pluralist, application of classical notions of cosmopolitanism to advance the frame of international criminal law to a broader construction of atrocity law and towards an interdisciplinary, contextual, and multicultural conception of justice.
During the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims ...were interrogated, tortured, and executed. In 2009 Duch stood trial for these crimes against humanity. While the prosecution painted Duch as evil, his defense lawyers claimed he simply followed orders. In Man or Monster? Alexander Hinton uses creative ethnographic writing, extensive fieldwork, hundreds of interviews, and his experience attending Duch's trial to create a nuanced analysis of Duch, the tribunal, the Khmer Rouge, and the after-effects of Cambodia's genocide. Interested in how a person becomes a torturer and executioner as well as the law's ability to grapple with crimes against humanity, Hinton adapts Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" to consider how the potential for violence is embedded in the everyday ways people articulate meaning and comprehend the world. Man or Monster? provides novel ways to consider justice, terror, genocide, memory, truth, and humanity.
This paper examined the framing of the war on Tigray on CNN and Al Jazeera from November 4, 2020, to June 28, 2021. Content analysis was used for the data analysis. The results revealed that, while ...CNN relied on eyewitnesses, including humanitarian workers and local people, Al Jazeera primarily relied on official sources to cover the war. CNN predominantly focussed on crimes against humanity and hunger, whereas Al Jazeera covered crimes against humanity. While CNN focussed on the responsibility and human interest frames, Al Jazeera focussed on the responsibility and morality frames. Both media largely focussed on the responsibility frame, emphasising that perpetrators should be liable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, aggression, and atrocities on civilians in different parts of Tigray, all of which epitomise genocide.
