Principled International Criminal Justice: Lessons from Tort Law

The Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law presents:  

Principled International Criminal Justice: Lessons from Tort Law

Speaker: Mark Findlay, Professor of Law at Singapore Management University 

This seminar is based on his book 'Principled International Criminal Justice: Lessons from Tort Law' (co-written with Joanna Chuah Hui Ying)

Abstract

This seminar takes up some of the main themes which Findlay and Chuah explored in their recent book Principled International Criminal Justice: Lessons from Tort Law (Routledge 2018). Commencing its search for a principled international criminal justice the argument suggests that the Preamble to the Rome Statute requires a very different notion of justice than that which would be expected in domestic jurisdictions. This thinking necessitates theorizing what international criminal justice requires in terms of its legitimacy much more than normative invocations, which in their unreality can endanger the satisfaction of two central concerns – the punitive and the harm-minimisation dimensions.  Any clearer understanding of the justice to be delivered through the international criminal trial immediately confronts structural and substantive complications arising out of harmonizstion/hybridisation, complementarity, and the limitations inherent in determining individual responsibility.  The book then suggests that because of the unique nature and form of the four global crimes (in terms of perpetration and victimisation) pre-existing proof technologies are failing prosecutors and judges, forcing the development of an often unsustainable line of judicial reasoning.  The empirical focus of the book is to look at JCE and aiding and abetting as case-studies in distortion.  From there, because of the substantial harm focus of international criminal justice it reasons compatible proof technologies from tort (particularly concerned with causation, aggregation, and participation) to relieve strained proof determining designed through technologies which never conceived the elements essential in the four global crimes.  Finally by examining recent developments in corporate criminal liability, and criminalising associations, the book radically asserts that even in the harmonisation/hybridisation paradigm for international criminal law there are pathways for a new vision the juridical project of international criminal justice

Biography:

Mark Findlay has written extensively on trial transformation in international criminal justice. For decades he has been a leading global figure in the development of critical global criminal justice and procedure, arguing new ways of perceiving the international trial process.  As the author of 28 books and more than 150 refereed publications he has an established reputation in regulation and global governance, international criminal justice, globalisation and crisis thinking.  He is a Professor of Law at Singapore Management University and holds honorary chairs at the Australian National University, and the University of New South Wales.

This event is free, open to all and no registration is required.