Suchergebnisse

This Article analyzes the absence of organs tasked with guaranteeing the rights of the defense in international criminal law. It explains the historical origins of the problem, tracing it back to the genesis of modern prosecutions at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. It then explains how the organizational charts of the UN courts for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone omitted the defense and essentially treated it as a second class citizen before the eyes of the law. This sets the stage for the author to show why the creation of the first full-fledged defense organ in international criminal law by the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon is a welcome advance in the maturing of international penal tribunals from primitive to more civilized institutions. The Article argues that if the legal provision contained in the Lebanon Tribunal statute is matched with the independence and resources needed to help realize defendant rights, it will likely become one of the statute's biggest legacies to international law.

The Special Tribunal of the Lebanon is the first international Tribunal established to try the perpetrators of a terrorist act: the murder of the Lebanese Prime Minister in 2005. This book, written by practitioners with experience of the court and experts in international criminal law, provides a detailed assessment of its unique law and practice.

In October and November of 2012, the Appeals Chamber of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) issued two key decisions affirming the legality of the court and the use of trials in absentia of the accused. Highly disputed within Lebanon and throughout the international legal community, both decisions are crucial milestones in the developing history of the STL, and mark critical developments in the evolution of the international justice system and international criminal law.

AbstractMore than 15 years after the assassination of Lebanese PM Rafik al‐Hariri, the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) delivered its judgement in the Ayyash et al. Case (STL‐11‐01) in August 2020. Reflecting on earlier critical scholarship on the STL, this essay considers the role of the STL in the regional and global geopolitical architecture, and the domestic context, in terms of justice, politics, economy and society. Despite the devastating impact of the assassination, persistent crises over the past decade and a half, have eroded the importance and relevance of the STL to Lebanon, its citizens, and even regional geopolitics. Within this context, this brief intervention considers who does and does not care about the STL and why it has or has not had the desired impact, socially, geopolitically, legally, and even within academic scholarship.

Part of this research was funded by the Australian Research Council. ; Lebanon's turbulent history has seen many political assassinations, but only one, the assassination of PM Rafic Hariri, led to the establishment of an international tribunal – The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) – in 2009. Why was the STL created? This study suggests that the creation of the STL constituted a 'normative intervention': purposeful attempts by domestic and international actors to transmit norms and institutions to a country to realize political goals. Normative interventions, particularly in divided societies, trigger 'normative contestations', which are shaped by the identities and interests of various actors. The result reveals that normative interventions deepen existing political cleavages. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed