Criminal Sovereignty

'State sovereignty' is often referred to as an obstacle to criminal justice for core international crimes by members of the international criminal justice movement. The exercise of State sovereignty is seen as a shield against effective implementation of such crimes. But it is sovereign States that create and become parties to international criminal law treaties and jurisdictions. They are the principal enforcers of criminal responsibility for international crimes, as reaffirmed by the complementarity principle on which the International Criminal Court (ICC) is based. Criminal justice for atrocities depends entirely on the ability of States to act. This volume revisits the relationship between State sovereignty and international criminal law along three main lines of inquiry. First, it considers the immunity of State officials from the exercise of foreign or international criminal jurisdiction. Secondly, with the closing down of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals, attention shifts to the exercise of national jurisdiction over core international crimes, making the scope of universal jurisdiction more relevant to perceptions of State sovereignty. Thirdly, could the amendments to the ICC Statute on the crime of aggression exacerbate tensions between the interests of State sovereignty and accountability? The book contains contributions by prominent international lawyers including Professor Christian Tomuschat, Judge Erkki Kourula, Judge LIU Daqun, Ambassador WANG Houli, Dr. ZHOU Lulu, Professor Claus Kre, Professor MA Chengyuan, Professor JIA Bingbing, Professor ZHU Lijiang and Mr. GUO Yang.

An expose of what really goes on behind the closed doors of state power

This new book by the well-known anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff explores the global preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves, an epoch in which criminology, broadly defined, has displaced sociology as the privileged means by which the social world knows itself. They also argue that as the result of a tectonic shift in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business; even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity. Thinking through Crime and Policing is, therefore, an excursion into the contemporary Order of Things; or, rather, into the metaphysic of disorder that saturates the late modern world, indeed, has become its leitmotif. It is also a meditation on sovereignty and citizenship, on civility, class, and race, on the law and its transgression, on the political economy of representation.

This innovative text is shows how there has been a concerted effort, since the end of World War I, to curb a state's power and freedom of action through the concept of international accountability to a set of recognized rules and norms. A state not only is to adhere to these rules but also can be sanctioned by an international penal process through enforcement of international criminal law. Adoption of the Rome Statute and the creation of the International Criminal Court are the culmination of many years of effort to challenge the power of state action. Scholars and students of international law with an interest in international criminal law will find this volume an interesting narrative of how the developments of international penal mechanisms of the 20th century have contributed to a diminution of state sovereignty. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

“The strength of this book is that it does not look at a single case or even a few disparate examples of drug, weapon, and human trafficking but looks at many patterns—intra-regionally, cross-nationally, and internationally. It is an innovative addition to the literature on the nature of the safe havens—or ‘black spots’—currently being used for illicit activity. This book will make a clear impact on the scholarship of transnational crime and the geopolitics of the illicit global economy.” —Jeremy Morris, Aarhus University, Denmark Transnational criminal, insurgent, and terrorist organizations seek places that they can govern and operate from with minimum interference from law enforcement. This book examines 80 such safe havens which function outside effective state-based government control and are sustained by illicit economic activities. Brown and Hermann call these geographic locations ‘black spots’ because, like black holes in astronomy that defy the laws of Newtonian physics, they defy the world as defined by the Westphalian state system. The authors map flows of insecurity such as trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people, providing an unusually clear view of the hubs and networks that form as a result. As transnational crime is increasing on the internet, Brown and Hermann also explore if there are places in cyberspace which can be considered black spots. They conclude by elaborating the challenges that black spots pose for law enforcement and both national and international governance.

This monograph examines North Korea's Office Number 39: its origins, organizational structure, and activities. The authors focus on Office Number 39's key illicit activities? to include manufacture and distribution of illegal drugs, the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, and the manufacture and distribution of counterfeit cigarettes. Finally, as Kim Jong-Il grows frailer, assessing how his successor may continue or alter Office Number 39's activities is also examined. (Originally published by the Strategic Studies Institute)

Grappling specifically with the norm of sovereignty as responsibility, the book seeks to advance a critical constructivist understanding of norm development in international society, as opposed to the conventional – or liberal – constructivist (mis)understanding that still dominates the debate. Against this backdrop, the book delves into the institutionalization of sovereignty as responsibility within the lived practice of the International Criminal Court (ICC). More to the point, the proposed exploration intends to revive questions about the power-laden nature of the normative fabric of international society, its dis-symmetries, and its outright hierarchies, in order to devise an original framework to operationalize research on how – institutional – practice impinges on norm development. To this end, the book resorts to an original creole vocabulary, which combines the contributions of post-positivist constructivist scholars with the legacy of key post-modernist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, as well as critical approaches to International (Criminal) Law and Post-Colonial Studies. The book will appeal to scholars of international relations and international law, in addition to critical scholars more broadly, as well as to practitioners in the fields of human rights and international justice interested in normative theory and the implementation and contestation of international social norms.

Scientific Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Law - Criminal process, Criminology, Law Enforcement, grade: 2:1, University of Leeds, course: Political Science, language: English, abstract: It is the argument of this dissertation that the International Criminal Court is an appropriate tool for the enforcement of international criminal law and embodies a shifting notion of state sovereignty. Historically, both multilateral and unilateral attempts to enforce international criminal law have been progressive but not wholly successful. The International Criminal Court is rooted in customary law and addresses the failures of past attempts. The Court's opposition has illustrated problems of state sovereignty, which in turn exemplifies how the International Criminal Court embodies a shifting notion of state sovereignty. The sources used are the existing academic literature, interviews, international statute, magazines, and newspaper articles.