Radbruch Redux: The need for revisiting the conversation between common and civil law at root level at the example of international criminal justice

International criminal justice is based to a large extent on extrapolations from criminal-law research on domestic systems. The difficult exercise of arriving at a common denominator is exacerbated by the systemic dichotomy of the so-called common-law and civil-law models, which, in turn, have now been joined by a third contender: public international law. Each of these has its own methods of approaching the task of solving legal problems. This paper queries the inter-model conversation that is happening so far and asks the question as to whether it is necessary to hold this discussion at a much more fundamental level than it would seem has been the case so far. It does so at the example of the relationship between German and English and Welsh law, but its concerns and conclusions merit consideration for the entire debate between the systems

International Criminal Defence Ethics: The Law of Professional Conduct for Defence Counsel Appearing before International Criminal Tribunals

This Article presents an overview of the Codes and relevant Rules of Procedure and Evidence of the ICTY and the ICTR, as well as an analysis of their provisions. The ICTR\u27s Code of Conduct is almost identical to the ICTY\u27s Code of Conduct. Primarily, this Article examines ICTY law. This Article closes with an outlook on the future of criminal defence before international criminal tribunals. As of yet, there is no provision for the professional conduct of defence counsel before the International Criminal Court (ICC)

Of Higher Intentions and Lower Expectations. A report about a failed survey project on using maqāṣid al-shari‛ah as a means of comparative governance research

The author had planned to work on a monograph related to the potential of using the maqāṣid in Islamic jurisprudence, uncoupled from their religious foundations, as a tool for the conversation with secular law and legal thinking, which by and large has shed its own religious roots and proceeded to an ethics-driven approach based on public policy or interest, and/or systemic logical coherence. The premise of the research project was that lawyers largely think the same thoughts and that they use different building blocks to construct rather similar-looking houses. The main instrument of the research was a survey questionnaire with a series of case-based scenarios sent to a number of Islamic scholars to provide the answers to the scenarios from the Shari’ah perspective. The survey failed in its entirety, so the research turned into an attempt to find the reasons for the failure. This paper will set out reflections on why it went wrong

Paradise postponed? For a judge-led generic model of international criminal procedure and an and to ‘draft-as-you-go’

Since 1945, international criminal justice has been one continuous construction site, an expression of the attitude of international stakeholders and policy-makers that favours temporary solutions to contemporary problems. Even with the creation of the ICC that has not really changed. This chapter will set out a few fundamental and rather radical ideas that aim at initiating a thorough rethinking of the way criminal proceedings at the international level are regulated and run today. It sees itself very much as a call for a principled re-evaluation and for a move away from the attempts of the last two decades of arriving at a genuine amalgam of diverse systems by the method of judicial trial and error. The existing model(s) is/are an exemplary expression of the temporariness of international law, because it/they proceed(s) from a refusal by international law-makers to engage in drafting a permanent model that retains fairness standards while striving for maximum efficiency and that is meant to be applied across the board to any (new) tribunal—an approach that would lead to much greater certainty of law than is currently the case because of an increase in cross-institutional comparability. The chapter contends that while both adversarial and judge-led systems in their own national settings can achieve comparable levels of fairness, they differ in efficiency and that a judge-led model is better suited for the international arena and should be made the foundation for any future permanent procedural framework. However, the temporary nature of the present system which mainly uses adversarial models is based to a large extent on an unprincipled reliance on supposedly ‘ready-made’ and ‘tried and tested’ solutions from as well as the experience of staff employed at previous tribunals. The use of the adversarial model is thus not based on a principled evaluation of its usefulness and effectiveness in the international context but on a default attitude of the lawyers creating and populating international tribunals, and possibly the diplomatic community in the wider sense