Search Results

This chapter presents an integrated framework for atrocity crime prevention, and is divided into four main sections. The first revisits the principal assumptions guiding our research and evaluate them in light of the project’s findings. The main building blocks of the integrated framework are then summarized before turning to the framework itself. Next, the chapter explores a number of targeted prevention tools with a view to: (a) highlighting the conditions under which they are most effective, (b) identifying issues that can arise from their application, and (c) specifying ways for enhancing their effectiveness. Finally, the volume draws to a close by exploring the implications of conceiving the responsibility to prevent as crimes prevention.

The chapter reviews examples of legal instruments and institutions related to atrocity crimes such as genocide. It then discusses the efficiency, or lack thereof, of domestic and international law, both with general examples and with examples specific to cases of such crimes. Multilateral treaties are costly to negotiate and, hence, require commensurate benefits. These benefits can be “negative” for potentially affected populations, for example, when states negotiate escape clauses that reduce a treaty’s intent and effectiveness in regard to the prevention of atrocity crimes. The chapter also asks exactly what sort of economic goods are atrocity crime–related laws and treaties and how best to provide these goods. It finds that conceiving of these goods solely as global public goods, and advocating their global public provision, may not always help the cause of prevention.

Federal courts resort to the jurisprudence of the international war crimes tribunals to interpret and enforce the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) against individuals and corporations. This practice challenges skepticism of foreign sources of law as federal judges invoke tribunal rulings to define atrocity crimes in ATS litigation, understand aiding and abetting principles, and determine corporate liability under the ATS. The long history of the tribunals embracing elements of substantiality and knowledge in their determination of aiding and abetting should prevail over one countervailing tribunal appeals judgment. Although the Supreme Court restrained ATS liability for corporations under the presumption against extraterritoriality, corporate liability remains enforceable, as does aiding and abetting liability shaped by customary international law. The author posits that corporate executives may become more likely targets under the ATS and suggests that the crime of aggression, once activated before the International Criminal Court, may trigger more scrutiny of corporations under the ATS.

In the absence of agreed normative frameworks and the development of tools aimed specifically at preventing and addressing atrocity crimes, international engagement in Burundi from 1972 to 2005 tended largely to prioritize conflict management efforts over measures designed specifically to prevent the commission of atrocity crimes. Overall, four main factors contributed to the prevention of atrocity crimes not being mainstreamed in a more meaningful manner into the international responses to the crises in Burundi, namely (1) a highly fragmented international community, (2) lack of national consent, (3) elite domestic opposition to intervention, and (4) a peace process which did not sufficiently implement preventive measures. This chapter reviews the manner in which international actors responded to the various crises in Burundi from independence onwards, drawing lessons which could inform the future development of measures designed specifically to respond to conflict situations characterized by the commission of atrocity crimes.

This chapter focuses on the role and responsibility of the Security Council to maintain international peace and security through the prevention of atrocity crimes, as reflected in the World Summit Outcome Document. It is argued that, considering the near impossibility of seeking consensus by the veto-wielding members of the Council, in some cases that require its intervention, it is essential that regional institutions assume a greater role in preventing and protecting populations against atrocity crimes. This chapter argues for a renewed approach to international efforts to provide requisite support to these institutions to ensure that they assume a proactive role in protecting populations.

This chapter examines the nature of the international responsibilities entailed by the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) principle and explores to what extent these responsibilities are recognized in contemporary international society. This chapter explores the nature of the ‘responsibility’ entailed by R2P, focusing on its quality (what sort of a responsibility is it?), scope (a responsibility for/to do what?) and agency (whose responsibility is it?)—questions that have been contested by scholars and states alike. Illuminating how these three elements speak to and reflect key aspects of cosmopolitan thought, this chapter outlines what a more cosmopolitan position on R2P would look like and how it adds normative sharpness to the debate surrounding the principle. The second part of the chapter asks to what extent states and other actors recognize these responsibilities in practice and behave as if there were protection responsibilities across borders. There are clear signs of an emerging recognition within international society of a shared responsibility to protect populations from atrocity crimes. Although agreement in principle does not translate neatly into agreement on how to act in specific situations, the experience of R2P does suggest the possibility of nascent and developing cosmopolitan responsibilities emerging from within the society of states.

This chapter introduces the edited book, Economic Aspects of Genocides, Other Mass Atrocities, and Their Prevention, by highlighting key theoretical, empirical, case study, and policy perspectives on economic aspects of genocides and other mass atrocities (GMAs) available in the volume. The chapter begins by identifying critical gaps in the fields of defense and peace economics and genocide studies regarding economic aspects of GMAs. It then surveys economic concepts, theories, and models applicable to the study of GMAs, summarizes how the rational and strategic nature of mass atrocities can give rise to unintended policy consequences, shows how microeconomic incentives and macroeconomic environments affect GMA risk and prevention, identifies the devastating micro- and macroeconomic consequences of GMAs that reverberate through households, communities, and nations, and proposes broad policy lessons for GMA prevention. The chapter closes by pointing to wide-open areas for future research on economic aspects of GMAs.

War and its accompanying atrocities have been part of the human experience since the earliest days of man. Although the refined, reassuring language of modernity and diplomacy may now ring familiar, as a practical matter, war’s severity and toll on humankind have hardly relented. Despite a slow and rocky start, the ICC’s efforts to hold the perpetrators of atrocity crimes accountable have intensified in recent years. But beyond simply investigating and prosecuting humanity’s most ruthless villains, the ICC has ambitiously sketched out a broader restorative mandate for itself. More specifically, the ICC, itself a first-of-its-kind institution, among its many innovative missions singularly enshrined the rights of atrocity crime victims to participate directly in the actual proceedings instituted against their alleged victimizers.

The well-documented “Road to Rome,” a common reference to the ICC’s founding Rome Statute, was as long as it was serpentine. Well before lawyers and politicians gathered in the 1990s to begin the drafting process, there were those who, grappling with the evidence of man’s capacity for inhumanity, expressed their belief in the need for a transnational tribunal with the capacity to deter atrocities and punish those who engineered and executed them. Stated plainly, although the ICC provides the educational, symbolic, and coercive benefits discussed later, the deterrent effect of the ICC, as it presently operates, is more limited. And this is bad news for victims, their advocates, and others who desperately want to see their former tormentors convicted, and who hope that the tangible threat of international legal action will, in the long term, deter potential perpetrators of atrocity crimes from engaging in their planned abuses.

Whatever one may say about the impact of international justice and international trials when it comes to deterring future perpetrators of atrocity crimes, one of the clear benefits of such proceedings is the possibility of creating a (relatively) neutral, and reliable, historic record. Indeed, victims agree that making such a record available to future generations is a prime motivator of victim participation. Such a record makes it more difficult for those accused to create fictionalized, self-serving accounts of what occurred. A proper understanding of the historic events, and even public outrage over the conduct that often took place in the public’s name, can replace the twin dangers of complacency and resentment toward victims. Substitutes for trial such as truth commissions and state-sponsored panels may help address some concerns of victims, but they also permit the state to potentially whitewash events, and fail to affix blame, create accountability or punish perpetrators.

This chapter focuses on the extent to which the contemporary project of international criminal justice cannot easily lay claim to what it imagines to be its past, because that past, despite superficial similarities, often exhibited fundamentally different concerns. It highlights three areas in which international criminal justice today is arguably dramatically different from how it was understood up to the 1990s. First, international criminal justice was for a long time much less obsessed with the criminalization of international law prohibitions specifically, and much more interested in the transnational dimensions of the criminal law. Second, it was much less committed to a strict model of individual accountability under international law and much more willing to see the state as the central pivot of international criminal responsibility. Third, it was intimately linked to peace projects whereas it has become intimately associated to the fight against atrocities and mass human rights violations.

This chapter offers a comparative consideration of the efficacy of civil versus common law in adjudicating atrocity crimes, using the example of the French war crimes unit prosecution practice. On 16 October 2017, representatives of international criminal courts and tribunals met in France at the French National School for the Judiciary. Their meeting resulted in the signing of a Declaration on the effectiveness of international criminal justice (Paris Declaration). In gathering professionals from international courts and tribunals where the need to comply with founding texts and specific procedures can challenge those who, by habit, comfort, or conviction, draw on their national practise to interpret and apply the rules of procedure, the question of common versus civil law practice was the implicit focus. The Paris Declaration was adopted at a time when disappointment towards the ‘efficiency’ of international(ized) tribunals and courts is high. They are considered too slow and too costly. In this context, it is not unusual to hear that international trials would be better managed and more efficient if they borrowed more elements of ‘civil law’ on their ‘common law’ foundation. The chapter then describes the main characteristics of each procedural system to help identify which procedural model has been favoured before international(ized) tribunals. It also asks whether national investigation and prosecution of core international crimes are more efficient.