Roger O'Keefe, International Criminal Law
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Pages | 418-419 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2016.0383 |
| Author |
As a discipline, international criminal law is no longer in its infancy. The flawed proceedings of the Nuremberg and Tokyo International Military Tribunals that followed World War II established the modern concept of individual criminal responsibility in international law. While there is little doubt that the convictions were properly substantiated, indeed the meticulous record keeping of the Nazi regime enabled the prosecution at Nuremberg to read back evidence to the defendants from their own documentation, they were achieved on shaky legal foundations and with a lack of procedural fairness that led former United States Chief Justice Stone to describe the prosecutions at Nuremberg as being akin to a “high grade lynching mob”.
Although the principles of international criminal law were developed and entrenched in following years both in practice, by the conclusion of the Genocide Convention 1948 and the trial of Adolf Eichmann before Israeli courts, and in theory by the work of the International Law Commission, international criminal law remained an area with potential rather than a fully recognised discipline. Writing in 1950, Georg Schwarzenberger still questioned its viability in the international legal framework.
The thawing of the cold war and the subsequent establishment of the Ad hoc criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda afforded the law and procedure a fresh opportunity to consolidate into a coherent legal framework rather than a collection of sporadic legal principles to the extent that, in 1998 and to the surprise of many, the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court was concluded amidst a blur of negotiation between government representatives and NGOs. Indeed, an entire undergraduate class wagered a pound each with this reviewer that the Rome Conference would end without agreement. At this point, the first generation of lawyers who had worked to create a recognisable system of international criminal law, passed the legal baton to the second generation on whom the onus is to implement an effective and fair system of defined law and procedure that is capable of holding individuals to account for egregious offences against international law.
Professor O'Keefe's book reflects the growth in the extent of law which has been given definition (if not application) and the range of judicial activity in this field. The book's content reflects a coherence and development in the law that did not exist in 1996 at the time of the...
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