John Reynolds

Third World Approaches to International Criminal Law

A pattern of affording impunity to local power brokers throughout Africa pervades the application of international criminal law (ICL) in Africa. The International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into Uganda is a notorious but representative example, although similar analyses can be made of the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Libya. In Uganda, only members of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) have been indicted for international crimes, even though the United Nations, international human rights groups, and local NGOs have documented years of abuses perpetrated by government troops and local auxiliary units, often against the same populations victimized by the LRA. The ICC is thereby implicated in the power structures and political arrangements of a repressive state that both combats the LRA and often brutalizes the civilian populations of northern Uganda. Inserting itself into Uganda, the ICC becomes a partisan player in the endgame of a civil war that extends back over a generation, and is itself rooted in ethnic and tribal animosities cultivated through 19th century Euro-colonial benedictions of favor. Here, the ICC and the war it adjudicates become surprising bedfellows, repurposed by local elites for the consolidation of domestic power.

Third World Approaches to International Law and the Ghosts of Apartheid

The concept and practice of apartheid was central to the post-war evolution of international law as a site of contestation between imperial interests and anti-imperial discourse, and as a clarion call for global solidarity action. This essay glances back at the recent history of international law through the looking glass of apartheid, and argues for the continuing relevance of its prohibition. The utopian rhetoric of universal rights and freedoms that we narrate into the story of the formation of the United Nations was not of central concern to many of the organisation’s imperious, war-victorious founders, whose ranks included one of the chief architects of white settler nationalism and segregation in South Africa, Jan Smuts. The eventual proscription of apartheid in the 1960s serves as a reminder of the role played by the decolonising nations in the development of legal doctrine, with the prohibition remaining a potentially valuable normative and analytical framework in situations where segregation and institutionalised racial discrimination persist or re-emerge.

Introduction: TWAIL - on praxis and the intellectual

Abstract This Special Issue emerges from the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Cairo Conference in 2015 and addresses the conference theme, ‘On Praxis and the Intellectual’, by focusing on different aspects of the intellectual as a political actor. In introducing this Issue, we provide some background to the TWAIL network, movement, event, and publications; and delineate our own understandings of scholarly praxis as editors and conference organisers. Broadly, we understand praxis as the relationship between what we say as scholars and what we do – as the inextricability of theory from lived experience. Understood in this way, praxis is central to TWAIL, as TWAIL scholars strive to reconcile international law’s promise of justice with the proliferation of injustice in the world it purports to govern. Reconciliation occurs in the realm of praxis and TWAIL scholars engage in a variety of struggles, including those for greater self-awareness, disciplinary upheaval, and institutional resistance and transformation.

Anti-Colonial Legalities: Paradigms, Tactics & Strategy

The right to rebel is a neglected topic in international law. The reasons for this lack of interest are to be found in the centrality of States as subjects of international law and their understandable reluctance to address non-State violence in terms of right. This approach is reflected in the tendency to look at opposition groups as illegitimate, frequently labeling them as terrorists. However, non-State armed groups are highly heterogeneous and their aims and motivations to use violence should matter at the international law level. This paper argues that the responsibility to protect (R2P) could provide the theoretical basis for the right to rebel against gross and systematic violations of human rights. The R2P doctrine maintains that each State bears the primary responsibility to protect the population within its borders; when it fails to do so, this responsibility is shared with the international community. In extreme circumstances, and where authorized by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), foreign States may use force in order to stop gross and systematic violations of human rights. If international law accepts forcible interventions by States into the internal affairs of other States in order to guard against gross human rights violations, why should it negate the right of the victims of such violations to mount a resistance of its own? International law has increasingly addressed the use of force by States within their borders. International humanitarian law (IHL) regulating non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) is now a fully developed field of studies. On the other hand, State violence in peaceful times has been taken away from the domaine reservee: the respect of international human rights law (IHRL) does matter at the international level, as confirmed by the R2P doctrine. Both R2P and the increasing attention for the respect of human rights by governments are in line with a top-down approach that pervades nearly all fields of international law. States are the central subjects at the international level; what happens within their borders might affect their legitimacy in the eyes of their peers, inter alia, but in no way does it grant a right to rebel to non-state actors within those borders. This paper challenges this traditional top-down approach. Several scholars have demonstrated that non-State actors can become subjects of specific branches of international law, such as IHL and IHRL. Now may be the time to take a step further and recognize a more active role for non-State actors. Victims of heinous human rights violations should not be passive subjects, waiting for foreign States to react to violations of their human rights: granting them rights would be pointless without a related right to defend and protect them. International law would thus regulate both state and non-State violence, and the latter would be legitimate at least when directed to stop massive and systematic human rights violations. This article is organized as follows. First, it focuses on the attempts of international law to address the right to rebel. Generally speaking, international law does not prohibit, nor expressly allow rebellions. Nevertheless, the right to rebel has been at the center of an animated debate through the centuries; furthermore, it has been object of codification at the domestic, regional, and international level. This paper then examines the ways in which the R2P doctrine could operate as legal basis for the right to rebel against human rights violations. Finally, it investigates what could mean, in practice, to recognize a right to rebel, especially with regard to foreign interventions.The tasks of this paper are (i) to explore the “alternative” public international law paradigms put forward by some as preferable to the “traditional” laws of occupation and armed conflict in understanding and challenging the situation in Palestine from an international law perspective, and (ii) to offer some thoughts on questions of tactics and strategy if law is to be deployed in pursuit of Palestinian liberation. Settler colonialism is the core ideological project from which the derivatives of forced population transfer and apartheid flow. These three overlapping frameworks are knitted together by common underpinning logics of settlement and racialisation. This was the case historically in European colonial empires, as it was under apartheid in southern Africa, and as it remains in Palestine today. The paper therefore begins by situating these conceptual frameworks in historical and legal context. It then considers law as a skeletal structure which can be fleshed out with hegemonic or counter-hegemonic muscle, before turning to discuss the perils and possibilities of employing legal tactics in pursuit of transformative anti-colonial strategy.

The Use of Force in a Colonial Present, and the Goldstone Report's Blind Spot

The ‘Goldstone Report’ is significant for its cogent documentation of potential international crimes and human rights violations committed in the context of Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in the Gaza Strip, as well as the light it shines on the habitual failure of authorities on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to acknowledge and adequately investigate such crimes and violations. The authors of the Report, however, neglect to address important questions relating to the recourse to the use of force under international law. Coming in the wake of a spate of wars in the first decade of the twenty-first century where the use of force has gravitated towards aggression rather than self-defense (Iraq the most prominent amongst them), the Goldstone Report represents an opportunity missed for a major international judicial mission to reify the prohibition of the use of force in international law. The implications of the report choosing to apply itself solely to the regulation of force and not the resort to force itself - in a time when militarism abounds under the guise of humanitarianism - are disquieting.