Emily Haslam

International Criminal Law and Legal Memories of Abolition: Intervention, Mixed Commission Courts and ‘Emancipation’

This article provides a critical reading of four cases that took place before nineteenth century Mixed Commissions on the Slave Trade at Sierra Leone. Mixed Commissions were early institutional sites where international law was confronted with multiple victims. Although they had the power to emancipate slaves, Mixed Commissions did not do so as a result of rights attributed to slaves as human beings. Rather the capacity of Mixed Commissions to emancipate depended upon the legality of the detention of the slave ship on which slaves were found. This legal link between emancipation and lawful intervention left slaves in a potentially precarious legal position. However, in two of the cases examined here the worst effects of this were avoided through slave resistance. This article aims to contribute to ongoing scholarly critiques of international criminal legal histories by interrogating how abolition has been remembered in international law.

Common Legal Representation at the International Criminal Court: More Symbolic than Real?

One way in which logistical challenges of multiple victim participants at the International Criminal Court are managed is through common legal representation. This looks set to effect significant changes in the nature of representation. First, minimising the number of groups into which victim participants are arranged rests on a problematic assumption that survivors share largely homogenous interests in participation. Second, practical constraints challenge the effectiveness of common representation on this scale. Third, whilst the Court has sought to underline the importance of consultations about representation with victims, circumstances severely curtail their feasibility. Finally, the procedure for appointment raises the spectre that common legal representation could become an indirect tool to monitor counsel, prompting questions about who can legitimately claim to speak for victims. Taken together these factors risk reducing the range of voices in the courtroom and rendering representation more symbolic than real.

UNLAWFUL POPULATION TRANSFER AND THE LIMITS OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW

T HIS article examines the draft Declaration on Population Transfer and Implantation of Settlers developed within the framework of the UN Sub-Committee on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities. The draft declaration provides for the criminalisation of involuntary population transfer. This article argues that the Declaration will be ineffective in practice and will introduce inconsistency and confusion into the law. However, the attempt to introduce a crime of unlawful population transfer reflects a lacuna in existing law. And yet, this gap is unlikely to be filled by extending existing international crimes to cover ethnic cleansing. This is because existing crimes do not address the international community’s sense of what it is that makes ethnic cleansing so heinous. Thus some action needs to be taken. However, this article argues that the ability of the international community to proceed appropriately is stymied by the fact that international criminal lawyers lack the basic tools and the concepts by which to categorise different types of harm.