Law Commons^™

Amnesty For Even The Worst Offenders, Jay Butler

Faculty Publications

In recent years, global policy makers have declared that heads of state must be held accountable through criminal prosecution for internationally wrongful acts. Scholars too have insisted that the international system’s embrace of accountability excludes or renders illegal the granting of amnesty. This Article argues that that position is too narrow and uses the ongoing conflict in Syria, as well as other contemporary examples, to examine some of consequences of the clamor for prosecution.

The Article rejects the binary juxtaposition of amnesty and accountability in current international legal scholarship, and instead seeks to broaden the terms of the conversation by …

Three Grotian Theories Of Humanitarian Intervention, Evan J. Criddle

Faculty Publications

This Article explores three theories of humanitarian intervention that appear in, or are inspired by, the writings of Hugo Grotius. One theory asserts that natural law authorizes all states to punish violations of the law of nations, irrespective of where or against whom the violations occur, to preserve the integrity of international law. A second theory, which also appears in Grotius’s writings, proposes that states may intervene as temporary legal guardians for peoples who have suffered intolerable cruelties at the hands of their own state. Each of these theories has fallen out of fashion today based on skepticism about their …

Humanitarian Financial Intervention, Evan J. Criddle

Faculty Publications

Over the past several decades, states have used international asset freezes with increasing frequency as a mechanism for promoting human rights abroad. Yet the international law governing this mechanism, which I refer to as ‘humanitarian financial intervention’, remains fragmented. This article offers the first systematic legal analysis of humanitarian financial intervention. It identifies six humanitarian purposes that states may pursue through asset freezes: preserving foreign assets from misappropriation, incapacitating foreign states or foreign nationals, coercing foreign states or foreign nationals to forsake abusive practices, compensating victims, ameliorating humanitarian crises through humanitarian aid or postconflict reconstruction, and punishing human rights violators. …