Law Commons^™

Genocide Treaty - Ethnic Cleansing - Substantive And Procedural Hurdles In The Application Of The Genocide Convention To Alleged Crimes In The Former Yugoslavia, John Webb

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Beyond "De-Nile" - The United Nations' Genocide Problem In Darfur, William Reisinger

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rights And Responsibilities: What Are The Prospects For The Responsibility To Protect In The International/Transnational Arena?, Carolyn Helen Filteau

PhD Dissertations

The dissertation involves a study of the emerging international norm of ‘The Responsibility to Protect’ which states that citizens must be protected in cases of human atrocities, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide where states have failed or are unable to do so. According to the work of the International Commission on the Responsibility to Protect (ICISS), this response can and should span a continuum involving prevention, a response to the violence, when and if necessary, and ultimately rebuilding shattered societies. The most controversial aspect, however, is that of forceful intervention and much of the thesis focuses on this aspect. …

Destroying The Legacy Of The Icty: Analysis Of The Acquittals Of Jovica Stanišic And Franko Simatović, Katherine Pruitt

San Diego International Law Journal

In a 2005 press release by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (“ICTY”), Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte stated “[t]he debate on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia is not subsiding. It is present in the daily life and media, and always politicised . . . I am much more concerned about the victims of war crimes and their families, and I appeal to you to make the victim aspect of any legal process a priority.” Despite this stated dedication to war crimes victims and their families, the ICTY’s Trial Chamber (“Chamber”) recently acquitted two state security officials …

Kosovo's War Victims: Civil Compensation Or Criminal Justice For Indentity Elimination?, Irene Scharf

Irene Scharf

This Article is presented in three Parts. The first Part examines the likelihood that the displaced war victims could receive some type of civil compensation for their losses through the local courts in Yugoslavia. Part II scrutinizes the basic international human rights doctrines and systems of enforcement to determine whether they may offer remedies for the victims of identity elimination. Part III explores the likelihood that, through the Yugoslav Tribunal, those responsible for identity elimination may be held criminally responsible for their actions in Kosovo.

Repairing The Consequences Of Ethnic Cleansing, John Quigley

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Emerging From The Shadow Of Nuremberg: Crimes Against Humanity In The Modern Age, Leila N. Sadat

Leila N Sadat

This Article demonstrates the central importance of Crimes Against Humanity (CAH) prosecutions at the ad hoc international criminal tribunals and in the International Criminal Court (ICC). It represents the first comprehensive and empirical assessment of what CAH charges accomplish as a matter of observable practice. This empirical analysis informs the construction of a new theory of CAH in modern international criminal law. The Article analyzes the early jurisprudence of the ICC and challenges the conventional wisdom that CAH must be interpreted unduly restrictively, with reference to Nuremberg in mind. Instead, CAH at the world’s first permanent international criminal court must …

Bringing War Criminals To Justice And Justice To Victims: Mass Rape In Bosnia-Herzegovina And The Efficiency Of The Icty, Meredith Loken

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper investigates if the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has been efficient in achieving its main objective of “bringing war criminals to justice [and] bringing justice to victims.” This study explores the historical context by which the ICTY was created, and therefore examines the disintegration of Yugoslavia, focusing specifically on the Bosnian War. During this conflict, rape was employed as a method of warfare; this paper presents a brief theoretical examination of rape as a war weapon and analyzes rape and sexual violence as explicit methods of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It explores the evolution of gender …

Assuming Bosnia: Taking The Polity Seriously In Ethnically Divided Societies, Timothy W. Waters

Timothy W Waters

This essay is a reflection on democracy, justice and intervention. It focuses on the Bosnian experience, where since the Dayton Accords the indispensable context for reform has been the international protectorate. This essay examines the assumptions used by the international community to govern Bosnia, which suggest a policy premised upon resistance to the fragmentation of the state under any circumstances, and a belief that the international intervention is simultaneously morally justified and a purely technical process for increasing efficiency. How necessary – indeed, how related at all – are those commitments to the dictates of justice? What is their relationship …

Assuming Bosnia: Democracy After Srebrenica, Timothy W. Waters

Timothy W Waters

Assuming Bosnia: Democracy after Srebrenica Timothy William Waters Associate Professor, Indiana University School of Law (Bloomington) This essay is a reflection on democracy, justice and intervention. It focuses on the Bosnian experience, which requires one to consider several actors: Bosnia as a state, Bosnians as a people or peoples, and the international community. For since Dayton, the indispensable context for reform in Bosnia has been the international protectorate, which is to say the deliberate abrogation of autonomous, democratic, domestic processes for some defined, and hopefully higher, set of purposes. These purposes are expressed in the Dayton Accords, though increasingly the …

Assuming Bosnia: Taking The Polity Seriously In Ethnically Divided Societies, Timothy W. Waters

Timothy W Waters

This essay is a reflection on democracy, justice and intervention. It focuses on the Bosnian experience, where since the Dayton Accords the indispensable context for reform has been the international protectorate. This essay examines the assumptions used by the international community to govern Bosnia, which suggest a policy premised upon resistance to the fragmentation of the state under any circumstances, and a belief that the international intervention is simultaneously morally justified and a purely technical process for increasing efficiency. How necessary – indeed, how related at all – are those commitments to the dictates of justice? What is their relationship …

The Blessing Of Departure: Acceptable And Unacceptable State Support For Demographic Transformation: The Lieberman Plan To Exchange Populated Territories In Cisjordan, Timothy W. Waters

Articles by Maurer Faculty

What limits ought there be on a state's ability to create a homogeneous society, to increase or perpetuate non-diversity, or to create hierarchies within existing diversity? This paper examines those questions with reference to the Lieberman Plan - which proposes to transfer populated territories from Israel to the Palestine in exchange for Jewish settlements on the West Bank - as an abstract exercise in demographic transformation by the state.

First the article considers if the Lieberman plan would "work": Would it create the alterations it proposes, and would those changes achieve a stable, peaceful, even just settlement? It finds that …

Toward A Substantive Theory Of Equality In Dayton’S Bosnia: Implications For Nations In Transition, Sheri P. Rosenberg

Sheri P. Rosenberg

The value of equality has little currency after genocide and ethnic cleansing. Restoring that value is no easy feat. Paramount, though not singular in this struggle for equality, is the role of the law. A state legitimates its common legal rights and duties through its legal institutions, which define the values and character of the nation. Equality and anti-discrimination jurisprudence is particularly important at the delicate moment of transition from genocide, because it grounds within society the normative shift in principles underlying and legitimating the cultural understanding and relationship to equality. Specifically, this Article addresses the question: what can equality …

On The Legal Construction Of Ethnic Cleansing, Timothy V. Waters

ExpressO

On the Legal Construction of Ethnic Cleansing

Timothy William Waters, Univ. Mississippi School of Law

Abstract

What is the true shape of our commitment to prohibit ethnic cleansing? This Article explores that question by considering a case observers have universally decided does not constitute ethnic cleansing. It examines the recent controversy in the European Union, when Sudeten Germans demanded that the Czech Republic apologize for having expelled them after WWII before being admitted to the EU. Their demands were universally rejected and the legality of the expulsions was reconfirmed by all relevant actors. So what is the consequence for customary …

Contemplating Failure And Creating Alternatives In The Balkans: Bosnia's Peoples, Democracy And The Shape Of Self-Determination, Timothy W. Waters

Articles by Maurer Faculty

A decade after Dayton, Bosnia is a fictive, failed state held together by outsiders' weapons and outsiders' will. All parties recognize that Bosnia's current constitutional dispensation is dysfunctional and are calling for change, but how should the international community respond? In deciding, we should recognize that we may owe Bosnians much, but we owe Bosnia nothing.

This Article argues that traditional self-determination doctrine is unable to justify either further claims for secession from Bosnia or Bosnia's own original secession. It examines the processes used by the international community to frame the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the recognition process for Bosnia, …

Sexual Violence As Genocide: The Developing Law Of The International Criminal Tribunals And The International Criminal Court, Jonathan M.H. Short

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This note will explore the treatment of the two primary violent sexual acts, rape and forced pregnancy, in modern international criminal law; more specifically in its treatment as genocide. The woman as an individual is the primary sufferer of sexual violence during armed conflict, however sexual violence is a calculated means by which perpetrators seek to destroy an entire ethnic group. Sexual violence is both an attack against the woman and an attack against the ethnic group, and should be prosecuted as such. While crimes against individuals are best prosecuted as crimes against humanity or under domestic law, crimes committed …

Clinton's Foreign Policy And The Politics Of Intervention: Cases Of Ethnic Cleansing And Democratic Governance, Daneta G. Billau

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines the sources of U.S. President Bill Clinton's foreign policy, with special attention to understudied political elements of intervention. The basis of this study is the Clinton Doctrine, in which Clinton opposed ethnic cleansing, and supported democratic governance worldwide. The primary research question asks to what extent and why was there a variation in Clinton's application of his own doctrine in the specific cases of Rwanda in 1994, Haiti in 1994, and East Timor in 1999. To address this question, the following five hypotheses are posited:

H1: The more vital interests are at stake, and the closer the …

Balkanizing The Balkans, Paul L. Atwood

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article seeks to place the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo war in the context of the larger issue of NATO expansion. It argues that the question of ethnic cleansing in that province of Serbia was largely exploited by the United States, the creator and most powerful member of the alliance, to break up the former Yugoslavia, to divide it, and to make it more manageable for Western interests. In the guise of stopping Serb repression, NATO seized an opportunity to build more bases throughout southeastern Europe, including those being constructed in NATO's newest member states, Poland, the Czech Republic, …

Kosovo's War Victims: Civil Compensation Or Criminal Justice For Indentity Elimination?, Irene Scharf

Faculty Publications

This Article is presented in three Parts. The first Part examines the likelihood that the displaced war victims could receive some type of civil compensation for their losses through the local courts in Yugoslavia. Part II scrutinizes the basic international human rights doctrines and systems of enforcement to determine whether they may offer remedies for the victims of identity elimination. Part III explores the likelihood that, through the Yugoslav Tribunal, those responsible for identity elimination may be held criminally responsible for their actions in Kosovo.

The Naked Land: The Dayton Accords, Property Disputes, And Bosnia's Real Constitution, Timothy W. Waters

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The Dayton Accords have brought peace and stability to Bosnia. Yet the Accords were intended to do more: they were meant to create conditions for the restoration of political unity among Bosnia's factions. On these scores, Dayton has failed. Moreover, there remains a wide rift between the international community's perceptions of the local parties' obligations and those parties' own perceptions and conduct.

One of the most complicated aspects of post-conflict Bosnia is the range of disputes over real property. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, and so far Dayton has proven singularly incapable of creating any meaningful resolution. …

The Right To Return Under International Law Following Mass Dislocation: The Bosnia Precedent?, Eric Rosand

Michigan Journal of International Law

On the night of May 2, 1997, some twenty-five abandoned Serb houses were set on fire in the Croat-controlled municipality of Drvar, part of the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was clear from all the circumstances that Croats organized the arson of houses in Drvar to obstruct the return of the original Serb residents to the area. Croat authorities then made a concerted effort to resettle displaced Croats in Drvar in order to solidify a stretch of "ethnically-pure" territory adjacent to the Republic of Croatia. These displaced Bosnian Serbs are just a few of the estimated 2.3 million …