L’impact sur le procès pénal de l’absence des accusés dotés d’une qualité officielle

L’assemblée des Etats parties de la Cour pénale internationale s’est réunie pour sa douzième session, à la Haye, du 20 au 28 novembre 2013. Cette session a succédé aux derniers développements dans les affaires kényanes des président et vice-président du Kenya, respectivement Uhuru Kenyatta et William Ruto, poursuivis pour crimes contre l’humanité et sollicitant de la Cour des excuses leur permettant de ne pas se rendre à certaines phases de leur procès. Les États parties au Statut de Rome avaient, entre autres, à se prononcer sur les trois propositions d’amendements au règlement de procédure et de preuve soumises par l’Union africaine, visant les règles 134 bis, 134 ter et 134 quater. La majorité des deux tiers exigée pour que des amendements au règlement de procédure et de preuve soient adoptés ayant été atteinte, ces propositions ont abouti. Les nouvelles règles 134 bis, ter et quater concernent respectivement « la comparution au moyen d’une liaison vidéo », « la dispense de comparution au procès », et « la dispense de comparution au procès en raison de fonctions publiques extraordinaires ». Sous certaines conditions, ces règles autorisent donc la présence virtuelle de l’accusé, voire sa simple représentation par un avocat. La réception de ces propositions a été justifiée par la volonté d’améliorer l’efficacité des procédures. Pourtant, le Statut de Rome exige la présence de l’accusé à son procès, en son article 27. Il importait d’effectuer une analyse juridique de ces nouvelles règles avant que ne soit analysée une proposition d’amendement de l’article 27 du Statut de Rome lui-même, d’étudier l’impact, non pas politique mais judiciaire de règles procédurales nouvelles, applicables à des procédures en cours et autorisant l’absence des accusés en charge fonctions publiques extraordinaires, sur le procès pénal de la Cour pénale internationale.The 12th session of the International Criminal Court’s assembly of state parties took place from the 20th to the 28th of November 2013, at the Hague. This session followed the lastest evolutions in the kenyan cases, The Prosecutor v. Uhuru Kenyatta and The Prosecutor v. William Ruto, prosecuted for having participated to the perpetration of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They asked for the Court to excuse them from their presence at trial. The Rome Statute’s State parties had to pronounce themselves on the amendment proposals submitted by the African Union, and more precisely on the adoption proposal of rules 134 bis, ter and quater. The new rules concern, respectively, « presence through the use of video technology », « excusal from presence at trial » and « excusal from presence at trial due to extraordinary public duties ». Under certain circumstances, theses rules authorise the virtual presence of the accused or their « total absence ». Yet, the Rome Statute itself requires the accused presence at trial in article 27. It was necessary, before an amendment proposal of article 27 is submitted, to legally analyse the impact of new rules, applicable to ongoing trial and authorizing the absence of the accused having extraordinary public duties, on the International criminal court’s trial

La notion de peine en droit international pénal éclairée par la CPI

La Cour pénale internationale, en sa Chambre de première instance II, a rendu une décision le 23 mai 2014 dans l’affaire Le Procureur c. Germain Katanga, fixant la peine de ce dernier à douze ans d’emprisonnement. Cette décision fait suite à la condamnation de M. Katanga du 7 mars 2014 pour complicité de crimes de guerre et de crime contre l’humanité, commis le 24 février 2003 à l’occasion de l’attaque du village de Bogoro, situé en Ituri, RDC. Cette décision sur la peine est la deuxième prononcée par la Cour pénale internationale depuis sa prise de fonction en juillet 2002, après celle prononcée à l’encontre de Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, intervenue également dans la situation de la République démocratique du Congo

La fin de la guerre aura-t-elle lieu ?

L’annonce du Président Trump du 19 décembre 2018 concernant le départ des troupes américaines de Syrie et les réactions qui s’en sont suivies font montre des incertitudes persistantes sur la fin des conflits armés, aussi bien sur le plan factuel, stratégique que juridique. La question du champ temporel d’application du droit international humanitaire n’a jamais été résolue. Il s’agit là pourtant probablement de l’un des enjeux juridiques les plus problématiques de notre temps au regard du caractère interminable des conflits contemporains. La ministre française des Armées Florence Parly, bien que reconnaissant l’affaiblissement du groupe en Syrie, déclarait au lendemain de l’annonce de Trump que « Daech n’est pas rayé de la carte, ni ses racines d’ailleurs, il faut vaincre militairement de manière définitive les dernières poches de cette organisation terroriste ». Cette déclaration, si elle ne constitue pas une annonce de l’interprétation juridique de la France sur la fin des conflits mérite une attention particulière en ce qu’elle fait indirectement écho à la théorie de l’absence de risque raisonnable de reprise de la violence, prévoyant que le conflit prend fin lorsqu’il n’y a plus de risque raisonnable que les hostilités reprennent. Cette théorie, qui rend possible la détermination d’un seuil élevé pour déterminer l’absence de risque raisonnable – par exemple l’annihilation des membres du groupe ennemi et non pas simplement leur affaiblissement – fait l’objet de notre analyse. L’objet, donc, n’est en aucun cas de prêter à la France une théorie juridique qu’elle n’aurait pas expressément adoptée mais d’en dresser les caractéristiques et conséquences si toutefois quiconque était tenté d’officiellement s’y rallier

Frappe de Bounti : la France conduit-elle des « frappes signatures » au Sahel ?

L’opération aérienne du 3 janvier 2021 menée par la force Barkhane dans le centre du Mali, au village de Bounti n’aurait pas eu lieu si les forces Barkhane avaient eu pour ordre de conduire leurs opérations conformément à une interprétation plus restrictive du droit de la guerre s’agissant de la sélection des cibles légitimes. Le processus d’identification des cibles légitimes suivi ce jour-là ne pouvait être valide que si l’État adoptait l’interprétation la plus extensive de la notion juridique de « participation directe aux hostilités ». L'interprétation des normes de référence crée un espace que les États utilisent pour choisir une stratégie militaire justifiée en droit. L’étude de ces zones grises, ainsi que des communiqués de presse du Ministère des Armées et du rapport de la MINUSMA, permet de comprendre que la force Barkhane, sous la responsabilité de Florence Parly, ministre des Armées, et Emmanuel Macron, Président de la République, identifie l’ennemi sur la base d’un processus extensif et anticipatoire. Ils semblent avoir eu recours à la notion de fonction de combat continue (FCC) qui étend les possibilités de frappes au-delà des moments et des espaces où se déroulent les hostilités. Ce choix a fait courir un risque important à la population civile.The strike conducted on 3 January 2021 by the French army on a group of individuals located in the village of Bounty, in Mali, would not have taken place if the Barkhane force had the order to select targets on the basis of a more restrictive interpretation of norms of IHL related to target selection. The way targets were selected that day can be valid only under an extensive interpretation of the notion of “direct participant in hostilities” as “continuous combat function”. The room for interpretation of the relevant norms creates a space that states use to frame a military strategy in accordance with a certain interpretation of the norms. The analysis of these grey areas, as well as press releases from the French Ministry of the Armed Forces and the MINUSMA report allows us to understand that the Barkhane force, under the command of Florence Parly, Minister of the Armed Forces, and Emmanuel Macron, President of the Republic, identifies the enemy on the basis of an extensive and anticipatory process. They seem to have a recourse to the notion of continuous combat function (CCF) that extends targeting possibilities beyond moments and areas of hostilities and, more precisely, to a CCF test based on circumstantial evidence that is not limited to conduct (engagement in hostile acts). This choice put civilians at great risk

The Critical Subject and the Subject of Critique in International Law and Technology

The making of legal subjects has long been a crucial terrain for critical theory, also in relation to international law, where both emancipatory promises and expressions of power or discipline are tied to how subjects are recognized and enacted. International law's modes of subject-making have therefore been an important site of aspiration, struggle, and critique. While some have celebrated the rise of the individual on the stage of international law, the liberal ideal of legal and political subjectivity lingering in these celebratory accounts has been confronted by different strands of feminist, post-colonial, and Marxist critique. With proliferating use of digital technologies in practices of (global) governance, the making of legal subjects has taken novel forms. Big data manufacture subjects in ways that spark new legal anxieties and destabilize or problematize established patterns of critical engagement. In data-driven practices that we will describe, subjects are no longer exclusively enacted as abstract autonomous entities or classified along stable criteria (of difference or enmity). Sustained by tools of pattern recognition and technologies for the “unsupervised uncovering of correlations,” nascent forms of global governance by data produce subjects as transient clusters of attributes and data points within transient clusters of attributes and data points—bundles of vectors within vectors, only tentatively and temporarily tied together. In this essay, we map out how this mode of subject-making has become prevalent in different domains of international legal practice. We trace these dynamics to changes in the exercise of state sovereignty and the technoscopic regimes—assemblages for information flow, processing, retention, and surveillance—that states rely on

Editorial : no journey is a straight path

Last year, the European Journal of Legal Studies (EJLS) celebrated its tenth anniversary at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). At a time when the EU fears and encounters erosion and disintegration, the EJLS took this anniversary as an opportunity to invite scholars from all over Europe for an intense and fruitful two-day conference on legal issues arising from the EU project. A selection of four conference papers features in this special issue. While the authors by no means underestimate the unique nature of the challenges currently facing the European project, they equally do not seem to consider that progress towards an ever-closer Union was ever meant to be straightforward

Vers une convention sur les crimes contre l’humanité ?

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement No 340956 - IOW - The Individualisation of War: Reconfiguring the Ethics, Law, and Politics of Armed Conflict

Will the War on Terror Ever End?

Published online: 10 March 2019The announcement of President Trump on 19 December 2018 that the US would withdraw its troops from Syria and following reactions provide evidence of the uncertainties on the end of armed conflicts, asa factual, strategic and legal matter.The question of the temporal scope of application of international humanitarian law (IHL) is one of the most unsettled issue of IHL, while it may be the most problematic in the context of contemporary endless wars. In the aftermaths of Trump’s announcement, French Defence minister Florence Parly acknowledged that the group had been significantly weakened, but said the battle was not over because the "Islamic State has not been wiped from the map, nor have its roots. The last pockets of this terrorist organization must be defeated militarily once and for all."This declaration, while not explicitly declaring commitment to a legal theory on the end of conflicts, deserves special attention as it reminds the language of the “no-reasonable-risk-of-resumption theory” according to which non-international armed conflicts end (and IHL ceases to apply in relation to it) where there is no reasonable risk of hostilities resuming. This theory, if the threshold to assess the absence of reasonable risk is set high – achieved once all members of the enemy group are annihilated – is the object of the present analysis.The goal of this blog, thereby, is not to attribute a legal theory to Francethat it has not explicitly adopted, but to investigate whatdoing so would entail

War Crimes as Vocabulary Shaping the Visible

The traditional exclusion of sexual violence and rape from the ambit of international humanitarian law stems from the long-established masculinist perception of war and the exacerbated invisibility of women and girls in that context. International criminal law tried to recognize this traditionally invisible suffering and pain in armed conflicts by characterizing rape and sexual violence as war crimes. This contribution explores the effect of the recognition of rape and sexual violence as war crimes on conflicts and societies as a case study to explore the use of war crimes and international criminal law—rather than International Humanitarian Law (“IHL”) norms—as a means of, if not regulating, at least framing, perceiving, and communicating about practices of warfare and the suffering they engender. In order to respond to this inquiry, this contribution asks whether the recognition of rape and sexual violence as war crimes led to a better acknowledgement of women’s experiences during armed conflicts. This contribution argues that it is impossible and undesirable to search for the deterrent effect of international criminal law in general, and war crimes in particular or to demonstrate that they prevent harm during armed conflicts. However, I suggest that they offer a powerful vocabulary that holds the potential to better acknowledge suffering and formulate counter-narratives accounting for the stories and lived experiences of victims. The war crimes vocabulary and the way it is shaped and populated by judges and scholars determines the extent to which suffering is visible and discussed beyond the courtroom

Le silence des agneaux : France’s war against ‘jihadist groups’ and associated legal rationale

Published online: 15 May 2020Silence is deceitful. While France has not publicly articulated a legal framework for its war on terror, its silence should not be taken for the absence of a well-defined military strategy and corresponding legal rationale. While the geographical and temporal scope of the United States’ war on terror has been highly debated from a legal point of view and led the US to develop extensive interpretations of the laws regulating the use of force, France’s military strategy remains largely underexplored by lawyers. This contribution brings to light that France frames its involvement in foreign territories as part of a unique war against jihadist groups, going a step further to the US’ war against “Al-Qaeda and associated forces”. Because France claims to fight against terrorism in the respect of international law, but without providing its interpretation of it in detail, identifying its military strategy allows me to determine what legal interpretations such strategy implies to embrace. These interpretations are much closer to the US’ than anyone would admit. The paper outlines the relevant legal standards applicable to the situations of use of force against terrorist groups and focuses on France, in an attempt to force the conversation on what it has been doing in the Sahel region, and following which legal interpretations of the norms regulating the use of force