Criminal Law Commons^™

Globalization, State Sovereignty, And The Development Of International Criminal Law, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

"Today, virtually all nation-states have gradually become enmeshed in and functionally a part of a larger pattern of global transformations and global flows. Transnational networks and relations have developed across virtually all areas of human activity. Goods, capital, people, knowledge, communications, and weapons, as well as crime, pollutants, fashions and beliefs, rapidly move across territorial boundaries. Far from being a world of "discrete civilizations, "or simply an international society of states, it has become a fundamentally interconnected global order, marked by intense patterns of exchange as well as by clear patterns of power, hierarchy and unevenness."

"To speak of globalization …

The Ukraine Crisis And The Future Of International Courts And Tribunals, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The Ukraine crisis is an example of modern-day conflict which poses various accountability challenges and demonstrates that not a single existing prosecutorial mechanism is capable of achieving a full measure of accountability while fulfilling the different goals of international criminal justice. As discussed in this Article, the prosecution of a sufficient number of Russian perpetrators of atrocities, as well as of Russian leaders, conducted legitimately and effectively, will necessitate the utilization of almost all accountability models - Ukrainian courts, a war crime chamber, the ICC, as well as an ad hoc aggression tribunal. The Ukrainian crisis demonstrates that all international …

Miranda In Taiwan: Why It Failed And Why We Should Care, Shih-Chun Steven Chien

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In 1997, the Taiwanese legislature amended the Code of Criminal Procedure to incorporate the core of the American Miranda rule into the legal system. The Miranda rule requires police officers and prosecutors to notify criminal suspects subject to custodial interrogation of their right to remain silent and their right to retain legal counsel. In subsequent amendments, the legislature enacted a series of laws to further reform interrogation practices in the same vein.

What happened next is a study in unintended consequences and the interdependence of law and culture. Using ethnographic methods and data sources collected over the past four years …

Amicus Curiae Observations By Public International Law & Policy Group, Milena Sterio, Michael P. Scharf, Paul R. Williams

Law Faculty Briefs and Court Documents

The amicus brief argues that in a case where the defendant alleges a ground excluding criminal responsibility (an affirmative defense), such as mental illness or duress, the defendant has an evidentiary burden to produce some evidence to support his/her claim of mental illness or duress, but that the prosecution retains the legal burden of proof to establish the defendant's responsibility beyond reasonable doubt.

“This ruling will have repercussions for future cases where the defendant asserts a mental illness or duress affirmative defense. Depending on how the ICC decides, future defendants will have to meet a specific evidentiary (or legal) burden …

Darryl Robinson's Model For International Criminal Law: Deontic Principles Developed Through A Coherentist Approach, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Darryl Robinson’s new book, Justice in Extreme Cases: Criminal Law Theory Meets International Criminal Law, presents a compelling argument: that international criminal law would benefit from deontic reasoning. According to Robinson, this type of deontic reasoning “requires us to consider the limits of personal fault and punishability,” and is a “normative reasoning that focuses on our duties and obligations to others.” Moreover, Robinson argues in this book that coherentism is the best method for identifying and defining deontic principles. Robinson explains that coherentism is an approach where “[w]e use all of our critical reasoning tools to test past understandings …

Women As Judges At International Criminal Tribunals, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article analyzes the presence of female judges within international criminal tribunals, starting with the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals in the 1990s. In particular, the Article discusses specific numbers of female judges at the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the newly created Kosovo Specialist Chambers, and the International Criminal Court.

While the presence of women as prosecutors, defense attorneys, victim representatives, and other professionals at these tribunals is equally important, this Article focuses on the number of female judges, as such data …

The Duty To Charge In Police Use Of Excessive Force Cases, Rebecca Roiphe

Cleveland State Law Review

Responding to the problems of mass incarceration, racial disparities in justice, and wrongful convictions, scholars have focused on prosecutorial overcharging. They have, however, neglected to address undercharging—the failure to charge in entire classes of cases. Undercharging can similarly undermine the efficacy and legitimacy of the criminal justice system. While few have focused on this question in the domestic criminal law context, international law scholars have long recognized the social and structural cost for nascent democratic states when they fail to charge those responsible for the prior regime’s human rights abuses. This sort of impunity threatens the rule of law and …

Individual Criminal Responsibility For The Destruction Of Religious And Historic Buildings: The Al Mahdi Case, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, also known as Abou Tourab, was a member of the radical Islamic group Ansar Eddine, serving as one of four commanders during its brutal occupation of Timbuktu in 2012. The International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted Al Mahdi on several charges of war crimes for intentional attacks against ten religious and historic buildings and monuments. All the buildings that Al Mahdi was charged with attacking had been under UNESCO protection and most had been listed as world heritage sites.

The case against Al Mahdi at the ICC unfolded relatively quickly and efficiently, from the official Malian …

International Criminal Law In 2013: The Most Significant Developments (Proceedings Of The Asil Annual Meeting), Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Presentations and Testimony

While many events have shaped the development of international criminal law over the past year, the most significant ones, in my view, included the Special Court for Sierra Leone's appellate confirmation of the Charles Taylor verdict, as well as the United Nations Security Council's failure to refer the Syrian situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Juvenile Pirates: "Lost Boys" Or Violent Criminals?, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has flourished over the past decade, and has both caused a global crisis in maritime shipping and destabilized regional security in East Africa. In addition, piracy attacks have spread more recently to the coast of West Africa, and in particular, the Gulf of Guinea. Thus, piracy is an ongoing global issue that should continue to occupy many maritime nations in the near future, and one that should command continuous scholarly attention.

This article examines the issue of juvenile piracy, with a specific focus on the treatment of juvenile piracy suspects by both the capturing …

Disparate Protections For American Human Trafficking Victims , Amanda Peters

Cleveland State Law Review

The federal government places victims, for the purpose of receiving protections, into two categories: first, international victims and second, American citizens or permanent residents. If an international trafficking victim qualifies to receive services as a result of having been trafficked, the United States will provide refugeelike protections through the TVPA. These protections include housing, food, cash assistance, job training, counseling, medical care, legal assistance, and other services that are available for a period of several years. Victims who are Americans, on the other hand, must find protection elsewhere. The United States government specifically excludes its own trafficked citizens from receiving …

Biased Justice: Humanrightsism And The International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia , Robert M. Hayden

Cleveland State Law Review

This article thus takes a close look at one of the most important of the elements of the new international legal order which human rights activists promote, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It finds that the ICTY delivers a "justice" that is biased, with prosecutorial decisions based on the national characteristics of the accused, rather than on what available evidence indicates that he has done. Evidence of this bias is found in the failure to prosecute NATO personnel for acts that are comparable to those of Yugoslavs already indicted, and of failure to prosecute NATO personnel …

International Jurisdiction And Prosecutorial Crimes, The Seventieth Cleveland-Marshall Fund Lecture , Richard J. Goldstone

Cleveland State Law Review

The topic of this address is international jurisdiction and prosecutorial crimes. Two distinct but pervasive issue-areas arise when discussing international jurisdiction and prosecutorial crimes. The first relates to the ability of domestic or national courts, whether in the United States or any other country, to try people for international crimes committed either within or outside their borders. The second concerns the establishment of supra-national or international courts with inherent international criminal jurisdiction. I believe that these two facets of the enforcement of international criminal law are neither inconsistent, nor contradictory. I am convinced that in principle and in practice, national …

Terror And Terrorism: There Is A Difference, David F. Forte

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

To formulate an effective legal and moral response to terrorism, fundamental differences must be acknowledged. We must realize that all acts of terror are not legally interchangeable. We should not create legal instruments that confound essential dissimilarities. We should acknowledge that terrorism is an organized, low level attack by groups trying to destroy the Western legal and moral order. We should recognize that many such terrorist groups have been given purported legitimacy by a distorted notion of self-determination and by recognition within many international bodies. Also, we should face the fact that the effectiveness of terrorism is immeasurably enhanced by …