Ruti Teitel

Post-conflict Justice

Thirty scholars and experts discuss and provide wide-ranging views on a variety of accountability measures: the establishment of ad hoc criminal tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; truth commissions in South Africa and El Salvador; and lustration laws for the former Czechoslovakia and Germany after its reunification. Also discussed are amnesty for previous crimes and accountability, post-conflict justice involving issues pertaining to the restoration of law and order, and the rebuilding of failed national justice systems. In addition, the book also contains an important set of guidelines designed to achieve accountability and eliminate impunity. The guidelines with commentaries have been prepared by a distinguished group of experts, many of whom have also contributed articles to this volume. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

Global Civil Society and Transitional Justice

In 1991, at the time of the Soviet collapse and following the Latin American transitions to democracy in the 1980s, Teitel coined the term ‘transitional justice’ to account for the self-conscious construction of a distinctive conception of justice associated with periods of radical political change on the heels of past oppressive rule (Luban 2006). Such political change was strongly associated with statebuilding and post-conflict transition, although, as Hannah Arendt and others have noted, even at Nuremberg a sense of reckoning with humanity itself was present. A more global aspiration of accountability became submerged in the focus on regime change and constitutional (re) construction. At that time, the foundational debates associated with transitional justice’s modern beginnings almost exclusively referred to state actors, institutions and purposes (Teitel 2000).

Beyond the Divide: The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Political Rights and the World Trade Organization

This collection of essays from leading academics examines the connection between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and human rights issues, a topic which has provoked significant debate, particularly in the decade since the collapsed WTO talks in Seattle in 1999.

Kosovo to Kadi: Legality and Legitimacy in the Contemporary International Order

Whence does international law derive its normative force as law in a world that remains, in many respects, one where legitimate politics is practiced primarily at the national level? As with domestically focused legal theories, one standard answer is positivistic: the laws authority is based on its origin in agreed procedures of consent. This is certainly plausible with respect to treaty obligations and commitments that derive from the United Nations Charter, but it leaves customary international law vulnerable to legitimacy critiques—of which there is no shortage among international law skeptics. Even with respect to conventional international norms, such as treaty provisions, there is often a sense that such consent is democratically thinner than the public consent to domestic law, particularly fundamental domestic law, constitutional norms, and derivative principles of legitimate governance. State consent in international law, in this view, is often a very imperfect proxy for democratic consent to international legal norms. While it is obvious to international lawyers why (as a matter of positive law doctrine) state consent should make international norms prevail over domestic norms to which there is arguably deeper democratic consent, persistent critics of international law have questioned whether this should be so as a matter of legitimacy.

Humanity Bounded and Unbounded: The Regulation of External Self-Determination under International Law

Abstract One of the most complex and uncertain areas of international legal doctrine concerns how to deal with the aspiration of a people to achieve self-determination through the establishment of a new state and the related claim to a specific territory over which statehood is to be exercised. Recently, when the General Assembly of the United Nations referred to the International Court of Justice the question of the legality of the declaration of independence by Kosovar Albanians, the Court was given an opportunity to clarify and develop the law on external self-determination. Instead, the Court answered extremely narrowly, confining its analysis to the legality of the act of declaration without determining any consideration of international legal norms applicable to the act of secession that was being proposed. This article intends to fill the gap left by the ICJ’s decision: first by critiquing the inadequacy and tensions visible in the existing doctrine and second by examining how recent developments in international law may allow for a more normatively coherent approach to the problem.