“Mr. Kenyatta is excused from continuous presence at other times during the trial. This excusal is strictly for purposes of accommodating the discharge of his duties as the President of Kenya”. With these words the ICC trial Chamber in the case The Prosecutor v Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta made one of the most significant decisions regarding the trial of senior state officers. The court was faced with an unprecedented situation: the leader of a country is, for the first time, due to stand trial before an international tribunal on charges of having committed war crimes. Continue reading
Private Prosecutions for Criminal Offences in England and Wales: Time for a Code?
By Claire de Than and Jesse Elvin, City University London
c.de-than@city.ac.uk and jesse.elvin.1@city.ac.uk
In the English legal system, most prosecutions for criminal offences are brought by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the prosecution service for England and Wales created in 1986 by section 1 of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985. However, this Act did not abolish the historical right to bring a private prosecution: on the contrary, section 6(1) of the 1985 Act expressly preserves it, subject to certain controls. Thus, private prosecutions still occur today. Continue reading
How High are High Officials: Analyzing Obama’s Speech on Syria
The early hours of August 21, 2013 saw a drastic turn in the Syrian conflict as a chemical weapons attack on civilians living in the agricultural belt around Damascus took place. Three days after the attack, medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres confirmed that three hospitals it supports in Damascus had treated about 3,600 patients with “neurotoxic symptoms” on the day of the attack; 355 of these had died.[1] Ever since there’ve been mutual accusations of the use of chemical weapons by the countering parties, namely Assad’s regime and the rebels,[2] which also caused a split of views and stances on the international plane. Yet, despite the absence of the forthcoming United Nations [hereinafter UN] report on the attack,[3] the parties to the conflict and the international community are all of no doubt that the attack has taken place. 10 days after the beginning of the political turmoil within the ‘concerned’ international community President Obama issued a statement on Syria accusing the Assad’s regime of the attack on its own people and calling for a targeted military strike to deter the regime from using the chemical weapons ever again.[4]
The Ineffectiveness of the Rome Statute
Syria. Egypt. Libya. The Democratic Republic of Congo. These are just a few of the countries where international crimes continue unabated. Nations where the perpetrators of impunity continue with their activities confident that there is little that the international community can do. In Kenya, two international crime suspects were elected to the two highest offices in the land[1]. Which then begs the questions: What went wrong with the enforcement of the resolutions of the Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries convened in Rome in 1998? [2] Apart from creating an administrative body based at the Hague and thousands of well paying jobs for the boys what else is there to celebrate about this treaty? Continue reading
Cultural Property Protections in International Criminal Law
Written by: Regina Paulose
“Wars, confrontations and conflicts in general, between two or more opposing factions, have always represented a serious threat to the integrity of the cultural heritage located in their territories. Unfortunately, this threat most often materializes in the form of the destruction of significant amounts of cultural property (movable and immovable): monuments, religious sites, museums, libraries, archives, etc. Humanity is thus deprived of a shared and irreplaceable cultural heritage.”[1] Continue reading
A Contrario ICL 