Criminal Law Forum, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2015 , Feb 26, 2015
This paper argues that the protection of civilians has slowly attained an increasingly central po... more This paper argues that the protection of civilians has slowly attained an increasingly central position in the design and implementation of peace operations. It contends that this change emerged from a series of both conceptual and operational evolutions that took a long time to take hold, and only did so as a result of repeated and persistent crises that put the entire concept of peace operations in crisis. The paper seeks to explore the specific course that peace operations have taken since the early 1990s in order to assess the degree to which the protection of civilians and, as a result, a greater willingness to use force, has become a dominant, even defining characteristic of peace operations. It begins by charting how peace operations have undergone a metamorphosis of sorts as a result of the rise of an increasingly strong anti-atrocity turn in international law and policy (section I). It then examines the relationship of peace operations to both the notion of R2P and the ICC, finding certain structural affinities between all three (section II). Finally, it seeks to interrogate the extent to which this evolution is determined by international norms and might prompt a process of legalization of a duty to protect civilians in peace operations (section III). The paper seeks to weave together strands of operational, political and legal thinking about peacekeeping that are often not dealt with together in a way that results in an impoverishment of our understanding of the issues at stake.
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American Court of Human Rights’ discourse with respect to amnesty laws and prescription.
Published in Wouter Werner, Marieke de Hoon, and Alexis Galán Ávila (eds), The Law of International Lawyers (2015).
La peur est tout d'abord qu'à force d'investissement dans les outils du droit international, les activistes des droits des femmes en viennent à oublier le potentiel critique de la pensée féministe, se condamnant ainsi à une reproduction des catégories. Elle est ensuite que le féminisme libéral passe à côté de ses effets pervers culturels et symboliques et qu'à travers une économie discursive biaisée en aboutisse à une représentation de la femme comme victime passive par excellence, ou enjeux de luttes entre groupes qui la dépassent (par exemple, le viol comme forme de génocide). Elle est enfin que le féminisme se prête, à force de cooptation, à des jeux de récupération et d'instrumentalisation, dans la lignée du féminisme impérial, légitimant profondément certaines institutions (par exemple, le Conseil de sécurité) mais aussi l'usage de la violence ou de l'incarcération.
Le chapitre conclut avec certaines pistes plus radicales que le féminisme critique explore depuis quelques années dont l'attention aux femmes comme "agents" capables de tromper les stéréotypes et d'apporter la contestation au droit international, la complexification du féminisme par une attention à l'ensemble des sujets genrés dont les minorités sexuelles mais aussi les hommes, et enfin le besoin d'une décolonisation du féminisme internationaliste et d'une redécouverte de la manière dont c'est souvent le droit international lui-même qui reproduit la domination masculine.
Premlièrement, cette responsabilité comporte un coût historique et historiographique dans la mesure où elle promeut un "narrative" des atrocités qui met en avant de manière systématique la nature "agentique" de l'individu aux dépenses des causes institutionnelles et structurelles; en outre, en rendant les individus responsables du tout, on crée une confusion entre les notions de culpabilité, de responsabilité et des causes d'un crime. Enfin, la causalité tend à être subvertie, les individus étant assimilés à des demi-dieux qui instrumentalisent l'Etat pour leurs desseins plutôt que l'inverse qui demeure plus plausible.
Deuxièmement, la responsabilité individuelle en droit pénal international comporte des coûts éthiques importants. Elle risque de blamer les individus de manière excessive pour des actes pour lesquels ils ne sont qu'en partie responsables, les transformant en bouc émissaires. Elle tend par la même occasion à aboudre l'Etat et la communauté internationale de leur responsabilité propres dans la survenance d'atrocités. Enfin, elle permet à la société et aux tierces parties d'échapper en partie à leur examen de conscience.
Troisièmement, la responsabilité pénale individuelle comporte des limitations judiciairres: dans la réalité l'examen des respoinsabilités individuelles passe presque toujours par l'examen connexe de la réalité collective des crimes de masse. En termes de justice transitionnelle, l'attention à quelques individus peut constituer un obstacle à la réalisation d'une responsabilité collective. En termes de réparations, on aboutit à un régime devant la CPI éminemment problématique qui concentre l'attention sur quelques coupables désargentés plutôt que sur les systèmes productifs de criminalité.
English Abstract: This article is an exploration of the limits inherent to the notion of individual responsibility in international criminal law and justice. It begins by highlighting some of the intellectual foundations for the emergence of individual responsibility in international law beyond its positivist grounding, including a pragmatic and utilitarian basis (avoiding the bitterness associated with the Versailles settlement), an analytical and historical basis (it is actually individuals who commit crimes), a criminal and international law basis (individual responsibility is required to modernize both and encourage their convergence), and an ontological and moral basis (it would be unfair to indict anyone else than individuals). The resulting concept of criminal responsibility in international law is then characterized as individualistic (the individual is cut off from its social environment), cosmopolitan (the individual owes duties directly to the international community), stigmatizing (the individual criminal is the enemy of mankind) and hegemonic (individual criminal responsibility increasingly dominates other forms of international responsibility). The article then turns two three major limitations of individual responsibility based on this analysis.
First, individual responsibility in international law has a historical and historiographical cost to the extent that it promotes a narrative of atrocities that systematically foregrounds individual agency at the expense of institutional and structural causes; that, in foregrounding the responsibility of individuals and making them liable for the whole, it muddles the distinction between guilt of a crime, responsibility for a crime, and cause of a crime; and that it tends to inverse causality, turning individuals into criminal semi-gods who instrumentalize the state for their purpose rather than the more plausible opposite.
Second, individual responsibility in international criminal law can have some significant ethical costs. In some cases it may excessively blame individuals for acts that they are only partly liable for, turning them into scapegoats; it consequently tends to absolve the state and the international community for their own share in the occurrence of atrocities; and it also tends to society and third parties too easily off the hook.
Third, individual responsibility also has some judicial limitations: international criminal justice is constantly claiming to concentrate on individual responsibility but, mass atrocities being what they are, is almost systematically led to examine collective responsibility both at some cost to the accused and to a better understanding of how the individual and the collective relate; in terms of transitional justice, focus on a few select individuals may hinder a realization of collective forms of responsibility, even as local public opinions will always perceive individual accused as standing in for their community; in terms of reparations, the focus on individuals leads to a highly problematic reparations regime in which all the attention is directed at the impecunious few rather than criminality-producing systems.
The article concludes with a few thoughts on the overall social cost of such a focus on individual responsibility, and how to move beyond it.
The paper suggests three ways of conceptualizing aggression that can be teased out of the discourse and examines their merits. It finds that the definition of aggression as first and foremost a crime against certain states' sovereignty, whilst undeniably capturing something, needs to deal with the relative normative decline of sovereignty, and its simultaneous implication in the very definition of what is or is not aggression (in a way that makes it difficult for sovereignty to act simultaneously as a signifier of meaning and gravity). Crimes against humanity and genocide as such have a better claim to our indignation, all other things being equal, because of their oppressive and asymmetrical character against the defenceless. More importantly, the paper considers the hypothesis of "war as duel" (one in which two states agree to fight each other), and concludes that we would consider a war no less grave simply because it proceeded from mutual sovereign assent from the outset. In other words, the condemnation of aggression betrays a concern with public order (war is wrong regardless of agreement by parties to it) and reflects above all our misgivings about war as a particular form of violence. We should not confuse war's most common cause (aggression) with the nature of the problem (violence in international relations).
The paper thus turns to a second possible conceptualization of aggression, namely as a form of crime against peace, as illustrated most notably at Nuremberg. Again, this captures something but the idea of peace as the value that is primarily protected by the prohibition on aggression is vague and problematic. In particular, the idea of aggression as the "mother of all crimes" fails to account for the fact that aggression is not necessarily causal of much of the violence that we find objectionable in war in that (i) we no longer typically think that the gravest atrocity crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity) necessarily or logically follow from aggression, (ii) not even war crimes follow strictly from the fact that there was an aggression, and at least we have no reason to think that the aggressor necessarily commits more such war crimes, and (iii) at any rate if it does commit a range of atrocity crimes, these are already and better prosecuted under their own name rather than as simply consequences flowing from aggression. What is more, the computing of the causal evil of aggression is made complicated by international law's obfuscation of the specific violence of war through two simultaneous moves (i) the humanitarian "laundering" of war, i.e.: the extent to which both the killing of combatants and the collateral killing of civilians (within certain bounds) are considered legal, even though they may well in practice account for the greatest number of casualties by far of any given conflict and our sense of revulsion at war, and (ii) the tendency of international human rights law to have abdicated the moral hight ground vis-à-vis the humanitarian sensitivity to war, under the broad rubric of the laws of war as lex specialis of human rights when it comes to determining who can be killed.
The paper then goes on to articulate a third and quite different conceptualization of the evil of aggression, namely that it is a violation of the rights of all of those affected by it. The suggestion is that a radical cosmopolitan take on human rights would rise up to its pacifist potential, and deny aggressor states the possibility of (entirely) hiding behind international humanitarian law to mask their sins by relying on the international reification of war. The chapter articulates some of the doctrinal moves that need to be made to realize such a change in how we conceptualize war, including expanding the recognition of extra-territorial jurisdiction in case of aggression. It seeks to explore all the implications of seeing aggression as a violation not only of the right to peace of collectives, but also to life and integrity of every individual affected by aggression, including not only civilians of the defending state, but also its combatants. More radically, it suggests that we should also consider as victims of aggression the civilians and combatants of the attacking state itself, that are put in harm's way by its decision to commit aggression, a decision that ex hypothesis cannot be justified either under international law or human rights. It also proposes a theory of how this new found sense of the human rights responsibilities of the aggressor might fit alongside the continued (but critically evaluated) application of the laws of war, seeking nonetheless to highlight a normative horizon in which the anomaly of the laws of war would be eliminated. It concludes with a few thoughts on how deploying human rights discourse against positive international law (including mainstream international human rights law) might be a way of helping the idea of human rights in international society rise up to its true potential.
American Court of Human Rights’ discourse with respect to amnesty laws and prescription.
Published in Wouter Werner, Marieke de Hoon, and Alexis Galán Ávila (eds), The Law of International Lawyers (2015).
La peur est tout d'abord qu'à force d'investissement dans les outils du droit international, les activistes des droits des femmes en viennent à oublier le potentiel critique de la pensée féministe, se condamnant ainsi à une reproduction des catégories. Elle est ensuite que le féminisme libéral passe à côté de ses effets pervers culturels et symboliques et qu'à travers une économie discursive biaisée en aboutisse à une représentation de la femme comme victime passive par excellence, ou enjeux de luttes entre groupes qui la dépassent (par exemple, le viol comme forme de génocide). Elle est enfin que le féminisme se prête, à force de cooptation, à des jeux de récupération et d'instrumentalisation, dans la lignée du féminisme impérial, légitimant profondément certaines institutions (par exemple, le Conseil de sécurité) mais aussi l'usage de la violence ou de l'incarcération.
Le chapitre conclut avec certaines pistes plus radicales que le féminisme critique explore depuis quelques années dont l'attention aux femmes comme "agents" capables de tromper les stéréotypes et d'apporter la contestation au droit international, la complexification du féminisme par une attention à l'ensemble des sujets genrés dont les minorités sexuelles mais aussi les hommes, et enfin le besoin d'une décolonisation du féminisme internationaliste et d'une redécouverte de la manière dont c'est souvent le droit international lui-même qui reproduit la domination masculine.
Premlièrement, cette responsabilité comporte un coût historique et historiographique dans la mesure où elle promeut un "narrative" des atrocités qui met en avant de manière systématique la nature "agentique" de l'individu aux dépenses des causes institutionnelles et structurelles; en outre, en rendant les individus responsables du tout, on crée une confusion entre les notions de culpabilité, de responsabilité et des causes d'un crime. Enfin, la causalité tend à être subvertie, les individus étant assimilés à des demi-dieux qui instrumentalisent l'Etat pour leurs desseins plutôt que l'inverse qui demeure plus plausible.
Deuxièmement, la responsabilité individuelle en droit pénal international comporte des coûts éthiques importants. Elle risque de blamer les individus de manière excessive pour des actes pour lesquels ils ne sont qu'en partie responsables, les transformant en bouc émissaires. Elle tend par la même occasion à aboudre l'Etat et la communauté internationale de leur responsabilité propres dans la survenance d'atrocités. Enfin, elle permet à la société et aux tierces parties d'échapper en partie à leur examen de conscience.
Troisièmement, la responsabilité pénale individuelle comporte des limitations judiciairres: dans la réalité l'examen des respoinsabilités individuelles passe presque toujours par l'examen connexe de la réalité collective des crimes de masse. En termes de justice transitionnelle, l'attention à quelques individus peut constituer un obstacle à la réalisation d'une responsabilité collective. En termes de réparations, on aboutit à un régime devant la CPI éminemment problématique qui concentre l'attention sur quelques coupables désargentés plutôt que sur les systèmes productifs de criminalité.
English Abstract: This article is an exploration of the limits inherent to the notion of individual responsibility in international criminal law and justice. It begins by highlighting some of the intellectual foundations for the emergence of individual responsibility in international law beyond its positivist grounding, including a pragmatic and utilitarian basis (avoiding the bitterness associated with the Versailles settlement), an analytical and historical basis (it is actually individuals who commit crimes), a criminal and international law basis (individual responsibility is required to modernize both and encourage their convergence), and an ontological and moral basis (it would be unfair to indict anyone else than individuals). The resulting concept of criminal responsibility in international law is then characterized as individualistic (the individual is cut off from its social environment), cosmopolitan (the individual owes duties directly to the international community), stigmatizing (the individual criminal is the enemy of mankind) and hegemonic (individual criminal responsibility increasingly dominates other forms of international responsibility). The article then turns two three major limitations of individual responsibility based on this analysis.
First, individual responsibility in international law has a historical and historiographical cost to the extent that it promotes a narrative of atrocities that systematically foregrounds individual agency at the expense of institutional and structural causes; that, in foregrounding the responsibility of individuals and making them liable for the whole, it muddles the distinction between guilt of a crime, responsibility for a crime, and cause of a crime; and that it tends to inverse causality, turning individuals into criminal semi-gods who instrumentalize the state for their purpose rather than the more plausible opposite.
Second, individual responsibility in international criminal law can have some significant ethical costs. In some cases it may excessively blame individuals for acts that they are only partly liable for, turning them into scapegoats; it consequently tends to absolve the state and the international community for their own share in the occurrence of atrocities; and it also tends to society and third parties too easily off the hook.
Third, individual responsibility also has some judicial limitations: international criminal justice is constantly claiming to concentrate on individual responsibility but, mass atrocities being what they are, is almost systematically led to examine collective responsibility both at some cost to the accused and to a better understanding of how the individual and the collective relate; in terms of transitional justice, focus on a few select individuals may hinder a realization of collective forms of responsibility, even as local public opinions will always perceive individual accused as standing in for their community; in terms of reparations, the focus on individuals leads to a highly problematic reparations regime in which all the attention is directed at the impecunious few rather than criminality-producing systems.
The article concludes with a few thoughts on the overall social cost of such a focus on individual responsibility, and how to move beyond it.
The paper suggests three ways of conceptualizing aggression that can be teased out of the discourse and examines their merits. It finds that the definition of aggression as first and foremost a crime against certain states' sovereignty, whilst undeniably capturing something, needs to deal with the relative normative decline of sovereignty, and its simultaneous implication in the very definition of what is or is not aggression (in a way that makes it difficult for sovereignty to act simultaneously as a signifier of meaning and gravity). Crimes against humanity and genocide as such have a better claim to our indignation, all other things being equal, because of their oppressive and asymmetrical character against the defenceless. More importantly, the paper considers the hypothesis of "war as duel" (one in which two states agree to fight each other), and concludes that we would consider a war no less grave simply because it proceeded from mutual sovereign assent from the outset. In other words, the condemnation of aggression betrays a concern with public order (war is wrong regardless of agreement by parties to it) and reflects above all our misgivings about war as a particular form of violence. We should not confuse war's most common cause (aggression) with the nature of the problem (violence in international relations).
The paper thus turns to a second possible conceptualization of aggression, namely as a form of crime against peace, as illustrated most notably at Nuremberg. Again, this captures something but the idea of peace as the value that is primarily protected by the prohibition on aggression is vague and problematic. In particular, the idea of aggression as the "mother of all crimes" fails to account for the fact that aggression is not necessarily causal of much of the violence that we find objectionable in war in that (i) we no longer typically think that the gravest atrocity crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity) necessarily or logically follow from aggression, (ii) not even war crimes follow strictly from the fact that there was an aggression, and at least we have no reason to think that the aggressor necessarily commits more such war crimes, and (iii) at any rate if it does commit a range of atrocity crimes, these are already and better prosecuted under their own name rather than as simply consequences flowing from aggression. What is more, the computing of the causal evil of aggression is made complicated by international law's obfuscation of the specific violence of war through two simultaneous moves (i) the humanitarian "laundering" of war, i.e.: the extent to which both the killing of combatants and the collateral killing of civilians (within certain bounds) are considered legal, even though they may well in practice account for the greatest number of casualties by far of any given conflict and our sense of revulsion at war, and (ii) the tendency of international human rights law to have abdicated the moral hight ground vis-à-vis the humanitarian sensitivity to war, under the broad rubric of the laws of war as lex specialis of human rights when it comes to determining who can be killed.
The paper then goes on to articulate a third and quite different conceptualization of the evil of aggression, namely that it is a violation of the rights of all of those affected by it. The suggestion is that a radical cosmopolitan take on human rights would rise up to its pacifist potential, and deny aggressor states the possibility of (entirely) hiding behind international humanitarian law to mask their sins by relying on the international reification of war. The chapter articulates some of the doctrinal moves that need to be made to realize such a change in how we conceptualize war, including expanding the recognition of extra-territorial jurisdiction in case of aggression. It seeks to explore all the implications of seeing aggression as a violation not only of the right to peace of collectives, but also to life and integrity of every individual affected by aggression, including not only civilians of the defending state, but also its combatants. More radically, it suggests that we should also consider as victims of aggression the civilians and combatants of the attacking state itself, that are put in harm's way by its decision to commit aggression, a decision that ex hypothesis cannot be justified either under international law or human rights. It also proposes a theory of how this new found sense of the human rights responsibilities of the aggressor might fit alongside the continued (but critically evaluated) application of the laws of war, seeking nonetheless to highlight a normative horizon in which the anomaly of the laws of war would be eliminated. It concludes with a few thoughts on how deploying human rights discourse against positive international law (including mainstream international human rights law) might be a way of helping the idea of human rights in international society rise up to its true potential.
ENGLISH VERSION FOLLOWS
"La dernière décennie a vu la mort de Slobodan Milosevic, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Oussama Ben Laden ou Mouammar Kadhafi. Car les génocidaires, criminels de guerre, dictateurs, tyrans ou agents du terrorisme international des XXe et XXIe siècles, meurent aussi. Dans tous les cas, les questions que posent ces disparitions singulières sont identiques, bien que se situant dans des contextes différents : quand et comment ces criminels sont-ils morts ? Que faire de leur dépouille ? Comment appréhender leur héritage, la mémoire de leur personne et de leurs crimes ? Malgré leur caractère crucial et leur actualité, ces questions n’ont pour l’heure suscité que peu de travaux dans le domaine des sciences juridiques et sociales. Si l’on observe un important regain d’intérêt pour la parole du bourreau en tant que source d’information, rares sont les études qui s’attachent au sort de celui-ci, une fois décédé. Cet ouvrage vise précisément à combler ce manque. La réflexion interdisciplinaire engagée ici met en dialogue les apports du droit, de l’histoire, de l’anthropologie, de la sociologie, de la littérature et de la psychologie autour de trois thématiques principales : les modalités de la (mise à) mort du bourreau, le traitement post-mortem de son corps, et la question de la patrimonialisation face aux exigences de justice et de réparation. Ce volume entend ainsi montrer les enjeux entourant la fin des criminels de masse – une mort jamais anodine, même lorsqu’elle est naturelle"
Sévane Garibian
"The last decade witnessed the death of a number of notable war criminals, perpetrators of genocide, dictators and terrorists, amongst these Slobodan Milosevic, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Osama Ben Laden and Muammar Gaddafi. Though the circumstance of each death may differ greatly, the questions each death raises are the same: when and how did these criminals die? What should one do with their remains? How does one apprehend their legacy, the memory of their persona and their crimes? Despite being of a timely and crucial nature, these questions have prompted little attention in the field of legal and social sciences to date. While there is a renewed interest in the perpetrator’s discourse as a source of information, studies that refer to his fate once he is dead are rare. This work intends to fill this gap. The interdisciplinary reflection undertaken here puts in dialogue the contributions of law, history, anthropology, sociology, literature and psychology, focusing on three main themes: the death of the perpetrator, the post-mortem treatment of his body, and the question of patrimonialization, faced with the demands of justice and reparation. This volume intends to shed light on the issues surrounding the end of mass criminals – a death never banal, even when it is natural"
Sévane Garibian