Submission of Amicus Curiae Observations in the Case of The Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen

The important questions laid out by the Appeals Chamber in this case highlight the need for the proper delineation and interplay between mental illness and criminal responsibility under international law. Specifically, this case represents a watershed moment for the Appeals Chamber to set a framework for adjudicating mental illness in the context of collectivized child abuse and trauma. This is especially true for former child soldiers who occupy both a victim and alleged perpetrator status

Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback

Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Drawing on fieldwork in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, sites of postelection violence in Kenya, and Boko Haram's circuits in Northern Nigeria, Clarke formulates the concept of affective justice—an emotional response to competing interpretations of justice—to trace how affect becomes manifest in judicial practices. By detailing the effects of the ICC’s all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the "objectivity" of the ICC’s mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so

Introduction: Understanding the multiplicity of justice

Since the end of the Cold War twenty years ago, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of international and transnational institutions for which “justice” has become a central ideological ordering principle, an implicit goal, or, in the case of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a formal basis for institutional action. At the same time, there has been a corresponding rise in the prevalence and cross-cultural resonance of justice as a framing discourse, a transnational normativity that gives shape to, but is not coextensive with, the modalities of international law, human rights, and preexisting cultural and moral imperatives. The problem, we might say, of justice is of course an old one indeed: Its complexities have formed the staple of debates within political philosophy for centuries if not millennia; within both theology and international law the centrality of justice has made it an iconic, if shifting, symbol that has at times come to represent the particular system itself. Justice has served as the illusive endpoint of any number of political and social teleologies, the utopian goal toward which movements of ideas and people have been hurled with sometimes tragic, sometimes heroic, consequences. More recently, however, the withering away of the logics of the bipolar postwar system provided an opening for the actual building and implementation of both international and transnational systems that had existed as either idea or unrealized possibility, including the international human rights system, the interrelated system of international criminal law, and the more diffuse networks of transnational actors that came to constitute what Eleanor Roosevelt, the chair of the commission that produced the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, called the “curious grapevine

Mirrors of justice: Law and power in the post–cold war era

Mirrors of Justice is a groundbreaking study of the meanings of and possibilities for justice in the contemporary world. The book brings together a group of prominent and emerging scholars to reconsider the relationship of justice, international law, culture, power, and history through case studies of a wide range of justice processes. The book’s eighteen authors examine the ambiguities of justice in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Melanesia through critical empirical and historical chapters. The introduction makes an important contribution toour understanding of the multiplicity of justice in the twenty-first century by providing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that synthesizes the book’s chapters with leading-edge literatures on human rights, legal pluralism, and international law

Introduction: Origins and Issues of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples\u27 Rights

In June 2014, at its summit in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government (\u27Assembly\u27) of the African Union adopted the Protocol on Amendments to the Protocol on the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights (the \u27Malabo Protocol\u27). The so-called Malabo Protocol was one of eight legal instruments adopted by African Union (AU) leaders, but undoubtedly one of its most significant. The significance stems, partly, from the consideration and addition of a third section to the proposed African Court of Justice and Human Rights (ACJHR) which had already formally anticipated the possibility of a regional tribunal with jurisdiction over human rights issues as well as general disputes arising between African States. The new Court will, once its statute enters into force upon achievement of the 15 required ratifications additionally possess the competence to investigate and try 14 international, transnational and other crimes in a highly ambitious tribunal with three separate chambers and jurisdictions:\u27 (1) the General Affairs Section, (2) the Human and Peoples\u27 Rights Section and (3) the International Criminal Law Section. The merger of these three chambers addressing inter-state disputes, human rights and penal aspects into a single court with a common set of judges represents a significant development in Africa and in wider regional institution building and law making.https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/faculty_books/1265/thumbnail.jp