Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:46:46.156Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Common Civility: The Culture of Alegality in International Criminal Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

MARKUS D. DUBBER
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Written from an outsider's perspective, this paper tries to capture the ethos, or, if you prefer, the Sittlichkeit, of international criminal law. It argues that international criminal law can profitably be seen as an ethos, rather than a body of law. In this telling, international criminal law, despite its name, emerges as an ethical–administrative enterprise rather than a legal one. If placed alongside global administrative law, for instance, international criminal law appears as alegal rather than illegal, so that to criticize international criminal law for violating, say, the ‘principle of legality’ would be like faulting apples for not producing orange juice, and oranges for not making apple pie.

Keywords

critical analysisEuropean criminal lawglobal administrative lawinternational criminal lawlegality
Type
HAGUE INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNALS: International Criminal Court and Tribunals
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 923 - 936
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 This paper is written from the outside of international criminal law looking in. It does not reflect anything resembling an encyclopedic knowledge of this vast, exciting, and ever-growing field. At the risk of serious omission, I have instead focused on a few recent texts that appeared to me to give particularly rich and influential accounts of the nature of international criminal law as a project; these include, in addition to Robinson's ‘The Identity Crisis’, Luban's, David ‘Fairness to Rightness: Jurisdiction, Legality, and the Legitimacy of International Criminal Law’, in Besson, S. and Tasioulas, J. (eds.), The Philosophy of International Law (2010), 569Google Scholar (and, to a lesser extent, his ‘A Theory of Crimes against Humanity’, (2004) 29 Yale JIL 124), Antony Duff's ‘Authority and Responsibility in International Criminal Law’, in Besson and Tasioulas, ibid., at 589, and Altman, Andrew and Wellman's, Christopher Heath ‘A Defense of International Criminal Law’, (2004) 115 Ethics 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, generally, Dubber, M., ‘Comparative Criminal Law’, in Reimann, M. and Zimmermann, R. (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law (2006), 1287Google Scholar.

3 See Robinson, supra note *, at 927, 929.

4 Dubber, M., ‘The Story of Keller: The Irrelevance of the Legality Principle in American Criminal Law’, in Weisberg, R. and Coker, D. (eds.), Criminal Law Stories (forthcoming 2011)Google Scholar.

5 See, generally, M. Dubber, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (2005). On the project of a Polizeistaat, or ‘well-ordered police state’, see, e.g., M. Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (1983); R. Dorwart, The Prussian Welfare State before 1740 (1971). For Foucault's insightful discussion of police, see Foucault, M., ‘Governmentality’, in Burchell, G., Gordon, C., and Miller, P. (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (1991), 87Google Scholar.

6 See Dubber, M., ‘The Legality Principle in American and German Criminal Law: An Essay in Comparative Legal History’, in Martyn, G. and Pihlajamäki, H. (eds.), From the Judge's Arbitrium to the Legality Principle: Legislation as a Source of Law in Criminal Trials (forthcoming 2012)Google Scholar.

7 Naucke, W., ‘Vom Vordringen des Polizeigedankens im Recht, d.i.: vom Ende der Metaphysik im Recht’, in Dilcher, G. and Diestelkamp, B. (eds.), Recht, Gericht, Genossenschaft und Policey: Studien zu Gundbegriffen der germanistischen Rechtshistorie (1986), 177Google Scholar; Zabel, B., ‘Die ordnungspolitische Funktion des Strafrechts’, (2008) 120 ZStW 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Jakobs, G., ‘Bürgerstrafrecht und Feindstrafrecht’, (2004) 5 HRR-Strafrecht 88Google Scholar, at 92; G. Morguet, Feindstrafrecht: Eine kritische Analyse (2010).

9 H.-L. Schreiber, Gesetz und Richter: Zur geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Satzes nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (1976).

10 A. Duff, supra note 1, at 600.

11 On the ‘wildness’ of common law, see R. Garré, Consuetudo, Das Gewohnheitsrecht in der Rechtsquellen- und Methodenlehre des späten ius commune in Italien (16.–18. Jahrhundert) (2005).

12 R. H. Helmholz, The Ius Commune in England: Four Studies (2001).

13 M. Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law (2010); The Idea of Public Law (2003). The classical example is A. V. Dicey, An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885).

14 M. Dubber, Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims’ Rights (2002).

15 In fact, sovereignty in international criminal-law discourse appears as an obstacle to, not as the source of, penal power. See, e.g., Altman and Wellman, supra note 1, at 39. International criminal law, rather than manifesting sovereignty, ‘deflat[es]’ it. Luban, supra note 1, at 578 (international criminal-law project recalls ‘early securalists’ deflationary view of state authority as manifestation of human rather than divine will’).

16 A denial that manifests itself also in the tendency to frame questions of state power in terms of the ‘powers’ of ‘government’, duly or at least prudently separated, where appropriate.

17 Dubber, supra note 5, Chapter 6.

18 W. Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (1996).

19 See, e.g., the Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, an entire journal devoted to ‘considering the issues from the perspective of ius commune Europaeum’.

20 See, most recently, A. Klip (ed.), Substantive Criminal Law of the European Union (2011).

21 M. Dubber, ‘The American Law Institute's Model Penal Code and European Criminal Law’, in ibid., at 209.

22 Congressional Research Service, International Criminal Court Cases in Africa: Status and Policy Issues, 7 March 2011.

23 See, e.g., Weigend, T., ‘Societas delinquere non potest? A German Perspective’, (2008) 6 JICJ 927Google Scholar.

24 Luban, supra note 1, at 575.

25 Ibid., at 571.

26 Altman and Wellman, supra note 1, Part V.

27 Robinson, supra note *, at 934 (‘in dubio contra reo’).

28 Luban, supra note 1, at 579; see also H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1994), 10; Osiel, M. J., ‘Ever Again: Legal Remembrance of Administrative Massacre’, (1995) 144 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 463CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peterson, J., ‘Unpacking Show Trials: Situating the Trial of Saddam Hussein’, (2007) 48 Harvard Journal of International Law 260Google Scholar.

29 UNSC Res. 827 (1993), Preamble, paras. 5 and 6 (‘restoration and maintenance of peace’); see also Fletcher, G. and Ohlin, J., ‘The ICC: Two Courts in One?’, (2006) 4 JICJ 428Google Scholar (contrasting ‘restoring collective peace and security’ with ‘the classic goals of criminal law to adjudicate individual guilt’).

30 See, generally, Koskenniemi, M., ‘International Law: Constitutionalism, Managerialism and the Ethos of Legal Education’, (2007) 1 European Journal of Legal Studies 1Google Scholar.

31 Chimni, B. S., ‘International Institutions Today: An Imperial Global State in the Making’, (2004) 15 EJIL 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Cooption and Resistance: Two Sides of Global Administrative Law’, International Law and Justice Working Papers No. 2005/16, Institute for International Law and Justice, New York University School of Law.

32 Luban, supra note 1, at 571.

33 See, e.g., A. Cassese, ‘A Big Step Forward for International Justice’, Crimes of War Project: The Magazine, December 2003.

34 Radbruch, G., ‘Der Ursprung des Strafrechts aus dem Stande der Unfreien’, in Radbruch, G. (ed.), Elegantiae juris criminalis: Vierzehn Studien zur Geschichte des Strafrechts (1950), 1Google Scholar.

35 See Robinson, supra note *, at 947; see also 954 (causation).

36 Duff, supra note 1, at 600 (‘humanity as a moral community’).

37 The debate about whether international law is ‘really’ law, of course, is as old as international law itself. For some recent contributions, see D'Amato, A., ‘Is International Law Really Law?’, (1985) 79 Northwestern University Law Review 1293Google Scholar (is law); J. Goldsmith and E. Posner, The Limits of International Law (2005) (is not law); M. Scharf and P. Williams, Shaping Foreign Policy in Times of Crisis: The Role of International Law and the State Department Legal Adviser (2010) (is too law).

38 See Judge Robertson's comments on the legality principle in Prosecutor v. Norman, Child Recruitment Decision, Appeals Chamber, Dissenting opinion of Justice Robertson, Case No. SCSL-2004–14-AR72(E), 31 May 2004, para. 14 (‘It is the reason why we are ruled by law and not by police’).

39 To say that the regime of international criminal law – or, for that matter, the regime of global administrative law – is not law in the sense of alegal (as opposed ‘merely’ illegal) is not to characterize, and perhaps to critique, it as an exception to, or deviation from, Law with a capital L or some particular system of law. It is to say that it is usefully conceptualized as not a system of law, but as an instance of an alternative mode of governance that seeks not justice, but peace, not right, but order: police. See Johns, F., ‘Guantanamo Bay and the Annihilation of the Exception’, (2005) 16 EJIL 613CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Again, like international criminal law in particular and international law in general, global administrative law has seen its essential, or at least necessary, lawness drawn into question. See Kingsbury, B., ‘The Concept of “Law” in Global Administrative Law’, (2009) 20 EJIL 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dyzenhaus, D., ‘The Concept of (Global) Administrative Law’, (2009) 2009 Acta Juridica 3Google Scholar. The alegality (or, more commonly, illegality) of international criminal law and global administrative law tends to be attributed to their ‘international’ or ‘global’ aspects. It is useful, however, to consider the alegality of their ‘criminal’ or ‘administrative’ aspects, as well, if only to guard against a certain international (or global) exceptionalism that obscures the connections between governmental regimes, domestic or not. The interesting question, again, is not (only) whether international criminal law is more or less ‘legal’ than domestic criminal law, but whether ‘criminal law’ in general can be usefully conceptualized as alegal. On the alegality of (domestic) administrative law, including its origin in the power and science of police, see Dubber, supra note 5; D. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century (1997); M. Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts, Vol. 2: Staatsrechtslehre und Verwaltungswissenschaft 1800 bis 1914 (1992). Note also that both international law and administrative law struggled to find a place in American legal education because they were initially dismissed as perhaps interesting, but not legal, subjects better left to other departments, notably political science. See Comment, ‘Ernst Freund: Pioneer of Administrative Law’, (1962) 29 University of Chicago Law Review 755.

41 A similar point might be made about global administrative law, which has traced its origins to Lorenz von Stein, who was more concerned with capturing (domestic, and only incidentally international) administration in its actual operation than in the legality, or legitimacy, of the modern administrative state. In other words, von Stein was more interested in the science or study of administration (Verwaltungswissenschaft or -lehre) within the context of a comprehensive science of the state (complicating the expansion of his project to the international realm), than in the law of administration (Verwaltungsrecht). His enormously ambitious project was primarily descriptive, rather than normative – even if this distinction is not easily applied to Stein, given his Hegelian approach. See Kingsbury, supra note 40; see generally Lindenfeld, supra note 40.

42 Luban, supra note 1, at 583.

43 Ibid., at 587.

44 H. Packer, The Limits of the Criminal Sanction (1968).

45 Prosecutor v. Norman, supra note 38.