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Radbruch Redux: The Need for Revisiting the Conversation between Common and Civil Law at Root Level at the Example of International Criminal Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2011

MICHAEL BOHLANDER
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Abstract

International criminal justice is based to a large extent on extrapolations from criminal-law research on domestic systems. The difficult exercise of arriving at a common denominator is exacerbated by the systemic dichotomy of the so-called common-law and civil-law models, which, in turn, have now been joined by a third contender: public international law. Each of these has its own methods of approaching the task of solving legal problems. This paper queries the inter-model conversation that is happening so far and asks the question as to whether it is necessary to hold this discussion at a much more fundamental level than it would seem has been the case so far. It does so at the example of the relationship between German and English and Welsh law, but its concerns and conclusions merit consideration for the entire debate between the systems.

Keywords

civil lawcommon lawinternational criminal justicelaw and linguisticsRadbruch
Type
HAGUE INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNALS: International Criminal Court and Tribunals
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 393 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2011

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References

1 Translation: Being German means doing a thing for its own sake.

2 Translation: My experience is that comparative law is often used to confirm a solution one had already found.

3 See on the general problems that that entails for the operation of the courts from the point of view of establishing an amalgamated procedure recently R. Skilbeck, ‘Frankenstein's Monster: Creating a New International Procedure’, (2010) 8 JICJ 451.

4 M. Damaska, The Faces of Justice and State Authority (1986), 28.

5 See M. Bohlander, Principles of German Criminal Law (2009), 16.

6 G. Fletcher, The Grammar of Criminal Law, Vol. 1 (2007), 145.

7 W. B. Hallaq, Shari'a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (2009), 308. There are, of course, many attempts now at modernizing the Islamic jurisprudence from within Islamic parameters as opposed to secularizing or even Westernizing it; ibid., 500 ff.

8 On the development of the law in the Middle East, see C. Mallat, Introduction to Middle Eastern Law (2009).

9 See on this phenomenon K. S. Vikor, Between God and the Sultan (2005), 254 ff. who calls the codification efforts ‘Shari'a through Siyasa’, i.e. implementing Shari'ah through state-sponsored codification. On the situation in Pakistan, see T. Wasti, The Application of Islamic Criminal Law in Pakistan: Sharia in Practice (2009).

10 See, e.g., A. Belal, Principles of Egyptian Criminal Law: The General Part (2004/05).

11 See on the underlying problems that this situation creates Bohlander, M. and Hedayati-Kakhki, M. M., ‘Criminal Justice under Shari'ah in the 21st Century: An Inter-Cultural View’, (2009) 23 Arab Law Quarterly 417CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which also deals with the Shi'a perspective and from which part of the above section is excerpted.

12 An attitude in which they are occasionally even outdone by the Spaniards; see Bohlander, M., ‘Case Comment on Tribunal Supremo, Sala de lo Penal, Judgments of 15 March 2005 (Case No. 336/2005) and 13 April 2005 (Case No. 463/2005)’, (2006) 70 Journal of Criminal Law 211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 J. Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People (1999), 133.

14 The usual popular reply to this that ‘I've got nothing to hide’ is naive in the extreme because it is always someone else who decides what in a person's behaviour is worth hiding for them, and therefore worth discovering for someone else.

15 See Bohlander, M., ‘“Take It from Me”: The Role of the Judge and Lay Assessors in Deciding Questions of Law in Appeals to the Crown Court’, (2005) 69 Journal of Criminal Law 442CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Prosecutor v. Zejnil Delalić, Zdravko Mucić (aka ‘Pavo’), Hazim Delić and Esad Landžo (aka ‘Zenga’), Appeals Chamber Judgement, Case No. IT-96-21-A, 20 February 2001, paras. 580–582 (emphasis in original).

17 Though not as far as the burden of proof is concerned: German law, for example, does not recognize any reverse probative burden to the detriment of the defendant at all. That would be seen as a violation of the presumption of innocence, would run counter to the duty of the court to ascertain the truth under para. 244(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and would ultimately be considered unconstitutional.

18 G. P. Fletcher, The Grammar of Criminal Law, Vol. 1 (2007), 136.

19 i.e., the emphasis on reasonableness as a guiding concept.

20 That does, of course, beg the question as to who decides what a reasonable juror would think. Is it the judge, when, for example, he makes a decision on a submission of no case to answer, called a ‘motion for acquittal’ on the international level?

21 Fletcher, supra note 18, at 141.

22 See, e.g., only recently, Attorney General's Reference (No 120 of 2009) & R v. Wright [2010] All ER (D) 93 (Mar); R v. Castillo [2010] EWCA Crim. 658; R v. Thomas and others, [2010] EWCA Crim. 148, para. 50.

23 This author is currently writing a monograph on that topic to complement his 2009 book on the substantive German law, to be published in late 2011.

24 G. Radbruch, Der Geist des englischen Rechts (1947), reprinted in H. Scholler (ed.), Gustav Radbruch, Der Geist des englischen Rechts und die anglo-amerikanische Jurisprudenz (2006), 44.

25 R. Vogler and B. Huber (eds.), Criminal Procedures in Europe (2008), 269; C. Bradley (ed.), Criminal Procedure: A Worldwide Study (2007), 243; M. Delmas-Marty and D. Spencer, European Criminal Procedures (2006), 292.

26 F. Floyd and J. Herrmann, One Case, Two Systems: A Comparative View of American and German Criminal Justice Systems (2005).

27 Available at http://forum.bmj.de/files/-/960/Criminal%20Justice%20in%20Germany_Auflage%205_englisch.pdf.

28 Available at www.lareau-law.ca/codification-Germany.html.

29 Parts of the following section are modified excerpts from my Principles of German Criminal Law (2009).

30 DPP v. Majewski, (1977) AC 443, repeated in R v. Powell and another; R v. English, (1999) AC 1 (emphasis added).

31 Prosecutor v. Milan Milutinović et al., Decision on Application by Dragoljub Ojdanić for Disclosure of Ex Parte Submissions, Case No. II-99-37-I, 8 November 2002, para. 14. He had previously made the same argument in the case of Prosecutor v. Dario Kordić & Mario Čerkez, Decision Authorising Appellant's Briefs to Exceed the Limit Imposed by the Practice Direction on the Length of Briefs and Motions, Case No. IT-95-14/2, 8 August 2001, para. 6, and in Prosecutor v. Zoran Kupreškić et al., Separate Opinion of Judge David Hunt on Appeal by Dragan Papić against Ruling to Proceed by Deposition, Case No. IT-95-16-A, 15 July 1999, para. 18. He was right to the extent that the Rules of Procedure and Evidence at the ICTY were judge-made in the first instance and ranked below the Statute in the hierarchy of norms. However, in systems in which the rules are not made by judges, this statement is questionable.

32 Citing as authority in the decisions mentioned above, merely two English civil-law cases from 1897 and 1907: Kendall v. Hamilton, (1879) 4 App. Cas. 504, at 525, 530–1; In the Matter of an Arbitration between Coles and Ravenshear, [1907] 1 KB 1. In the latter, Sir Richard Henn Collins, the Master of the Rolls, said in the Court of Appeal (at 4): ‘Although I agree that a Court cannot conduct its business without a code of procedure, I think that the relation of rules of practice to the work of justice is intended to be that of handmaid rather than mistress, and the Court ought not to be so far bound and tied by rules, which are after all only intended as general rules of procedure, as to be compelled to do what will cause injustice in the particular case.’ Whether that translates into a statement as general as Hunt J. may have understood it is open to question.

33 This is another typical area of divergence between common and civil-law systems, as has been shown by Mirjan Damaska in his seminal work, The Faces of Justice and State Authority: A Comparative Approach to the Legal Process (1986).

34 See also G. Radbruch, Der Geist des englischen Rechts und die anglo-amerikanische Jurisprudenz: Aufsätze herausgegeben und eingeführt von Heinrich Scholler (2006).

35 Of course, in some areas of German law, notably labour and employment law, large sections are almost wholly judge-made because the government has for some reason or other not taken up the burden of providing for proper codification. Very often, Parliament will, in its acts, codify a long-standing and proven judicial tradition and, to that extent, there is, of course, a judicial influence on codified law-making, too.

36 StPO = Strafprozessordnung = Code of Criminal Procedure, section 244(2) StPO.

37 See L. Meyer-Goßner, Strafprozessordnung (2010), para. 238, marginal number 22, with references to the case law.

38 [1976] AC 182.

39 See for a portrait the online edition of the German paper Die Zeit of 10 November 2009 available at www.zeit.de/2009/46/A-Radbruch.

40 Translation: ‘The Spirit of English Law’.

41 Radbruch, supra note 24, at 47–8: ‘Englischem Denken liegt es nicht, die Tatsachen mittels der Vernunft zu vergewaltigen, es sucht die Vernunft in den Dingen, Vernunft ist ih[m] Natur der Sache. Dieser englische Tatsachensinn liebt es auch nicht, Entschlüsse zu gründen auf die Erwartung künftiger Tatsachen, er lässt die Tatsachen an sich herankommen, um sich erst dann zu entscheiden, wenn sie da sind. Er traut weder der Phantasie noch der Berechnung künftiger Situationen, die wirkliche Situation ist ja immer ganz anders; er wartet vielmehr, bis die Situation selbst die Entscheidung bringt, zur Entscheidung zwingt. Er fühlt sich . . . nicht verpflichtet zur Eleganz der klaren Linie, zur Vermeidung eines unschönen Zickzackkurses . . ., seine Stärke ist, sich jeweils nach der neuen Lage berichtigen und umstellen zu können’.

42 Ibid., at 48: ‘Maitland, der große englische Rechtshistoriker, spricht in gleichem Sinne einmal von stumbling forward in our empirical fashion, blundering into wisdom’.

43 Ibid., at 48: ‘Ganz entsprechend sagt Macaulay von der englischen Gesetzgebung Vernachlässigung der symmetrischen und geschickten Anordnung; niemals Beseitigung einer Anomalie bloß um deswillen, weil sie eine Anomalie gewesen; keine Neuerung, wenn nicht eine Beschwernis unmittelbar empfunden wurde, und dann Neuerung nur insoweit, als gerade zur Beseitigung eben dieser Beschwernis notwendig war’.

44 Ibid., at 49: ‘Deshalb sind die meisten englischen Juristen gegen Kodifikationen, gegen die Zusammenfassung ganzer Rechtsgebiete in umfassenden Gesetzbüchern, und für eine Rechtsfindung, die aus Anlass des einzelnen Falles und nur für diesen Fall und seinesgleichen neues Recht schafft’.

45 Ibid., at 49.

46 ‘Originell und insular ist schon der englische Sprachgebrauch in bezug auf das Recht. Während in den kontinentalen Hauptsprachen das Wort “für Recht” vom Graden und Rechtsseitigen, vom Richtigen und Rechten hergenommen ist (Recht, droit, diritto), ist es im Englischen vom Gesetze abgeleitet: “the law”’ (59).

47 ‘Strafrecht in der Europäischen Union’, (2005) 117 ZStW 889, at 908: ‘Es liegt auf der Hand, dass die Wahl für eine europäische Rechtssprache auf das Englische fallen dürfte. Das ist zwar insofern problematisch, als das kontinentale (und damit nichtenglische) Strafrecht in Europa insgesamt stärker verbreitet ist und mehr Gemeinsamkeiten hat als die englischsprachigen Strafrechtsordnungen . . . . Aber die Erfahrungen mit der englischen Rechtssprache in internationalen Strafgerichtshöfen zeigen, dass bei ausgewogenen Sachregelungen durchaus ein neues und eigenständiges System entstehen und seine Balance finden wird. Deswegen sollte es möglich sein, dass sich Englisch als gemeinsame europäische Rechtssprache aus seinem nationalen Kontext löst.’

48 See on the codification efforts and the reluctant response J. Lavery, ‘Codification of the Criminal Law: An Attainable Ideal?’, (2010) 74 Journal of Criminal Law 557.

49 See M. Bohlander and M. Findlay, ‘The Use of Domestic Sources as a Basis for International Criminal Law Principles’, in The Global Community Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence 2002, Vol. I (2003), 3 (from which some of this section is a modified excerpt); M. Bohlander, ‘The Influence of Academic Research on the Jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: A First Overview’, in The Global Community: Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence 2003 (2004), 195; M. Bohlander, ‘The General Part: Judicial Developments’, in C. Bassiouni (ed.), International Criminal Law III (2008), 517.

50 Skilbeck, R., ‘Frankenstein's Monster: Creating a New International Procedure’, (2010) 8 Journal of International Criminal Justice 462CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 See the previous footnote and Bohlander, M., ‘No Country for Old Men? Age Limits for Judges at International Criminal Tribunals’, (2010) 1 Indian Yearbook of International Law and Policy 327Google Scholar; M. Bohlander, ‘Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility? A Pragmatic Proposal for the Recruitment of Judges at the ICC and Other International Criminal Courts’, (2009) New Criminal Law Review 529; M. Bohlander, ‘The International Criminal Judiciary: Problems of Judicial Selection, Independence and Ethics’, in M. Bohlander (ed.), International Criminal Justice: A Critical Analysis of Institutions and Procedures (2007), 325.

52 Anecdotal and anonymous evidence may be permitted about this author's encounter with different international judges in a social context, one of whom apparently thought that in civil-law systems, the accused has to prove her innocence and the other stating at a symposium, with undisguised surprise during the course of a debate about adversarial versus inquisitorial principles, that this had been an epiphany for them because, until that moment, they had thought that ‘adversarial’ simply meant that the prosecution is the adversary of the defence. Another otherwise very bright young lawyer who now is a professor at a renowned law school actually asked in all seriousness whether civil-law systems knew something like the Fifth Amendment.

53 Mikaeli Muhimana v. The Prosecutor, Appeals Chamber Judgement, Case No. ICTR-95-1B-A, 21 May 2007, para. 9 of the Dissenting Opinion (emphasis added).

54 M. Bohlander, ‘Comment on ICTR, Judgement and Sentence, Prosecutor v. Mikaeli Muhimana, of 28 April 2005’, in A. Klip and G. Sluiter (eds.), Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals, Vol. XXII (2009), 516, at 519 (footnotes omitted).

55 See more recently in a similar vein A. T. Cayley and A. Orenstein, ‘Motion for Judgement of Acquittal in the Ad Hoc and Hybrid Tribunals: What Purpose If Any Does It Serve?’, (2010) JICJ 575.

56 See the dissent, available at www.icty.org/x/cases/jelisic/acjug/en/jel-aj010705.pdf, at 49, where he said at para. 14: ‘In particular, it seems to me that (excepting clear cases of insufficiency of evidence, in which the decision goes in favour of the defence) the danger of deciding a no case issue by attempting to adjudicate on guilt at the mid-trial stage is that, if the no case decision went against the accused, he would understandably feel that the Trial Chamber had made a definitive finding of guilt, so that, in his mind, subsequent defence evidence and submissions would be addressed to a court which had already come to a conclusion as to the result of the case. It could not be correct to engender such lack of confidence in the judicial process.’

57 See his dissent, available at www.icty.org/x/cases/jelisic/acjug/en/jel-aj010705.pdf, at 71, paras. 5–6.

58 See his dissent, available at www.icty.org/x/cases/jelisic/acjug/en/jel-aj010705.pdf, at 49, paras. 2–14.

59 Prosecutor v. Kunarac et al., Case No. IT-96-23-T & IT-96-23/1-T, Judgment of 22 February 2001, paras. 437 ff. available at www.icty.org/x/cases/kunarac/tjug/en/kun-tj010222e.pdf; and see M. Bohlander, ‘Mistaken Consent to Sex, Political Correctness and Correct Policy’, (2007) Journal of Criminal Law 412, at 420 ff. for a summary overview of the arguments.

60 Wragg, P., ‘“Free Speech Is Not Valued If Only Valued Speech Is Free”: Connolly, Consistency and Some Article 10 Concerns’, (2009) 15 European Public Law 111Google Scholar.

61 See in a similar vein A. D'Amato, ‘It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Jus Cogens!’, (1991) 6 Conn. JIL 1.