Customer Reviews

From Nuremberg to The Hague: The Future of International Criminal Justice

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From Nuremberg to The Hague is based on a 2002 lecture series by leading experts in international law, including Mr. Sands. Given just as the global war on terror was getting under way, this book is a very brief introduction to legal proceedings that will become prominent in coming years. While not a work that will inform lawyers already in the field, it can be insightful for lawyers and law students not in international law, and it can be a clearly-worded explanation to laypeople.

Andrew Clapham's lecture on complicity and complementarity may burst a lot of myths about International Criminal Court jurisdiction: it is only when a country will not prosecute war crimes that the ICC begins to assert itself, something that lawmakers should consider before absolving or pardoning any suspects in recent conflicts. Mr. Sands' own article on the 1998 Pinochet case shows just how much of a watershed this case was: after Pinochet, retired government officials may find unexpected problems if they travel. This was not true after Vietnam, but it is true after Pinochet.

The chapters on the ICC and the Rome Statute are short and, of necessity, sketchy, but it's worth reading what experts in the field thought, both in historical context (as of 2002) and in general applicability. Given that a U.S. administration is retiring, a new administration and Congress are taking over, and that the world faces new war crimes and piracy in various places as I write, this book is a helpful introduction to this area of international law.

This book is also a useful introduction to Mr. Sands' books, "Lawless World" and "Torture Team," both of which I also recommend. Here, he sets the stage, and in his later works he presents his own analysis, and indictments. As someone who writes and research on some areas of war-crime law, I find From Nuremberg to The Hague, and Mr. Sands' work in general, to be indispensable.

The five essays in this short book dip into various aspects of post-World War II international criminal law. Although clearly written, the essays are only loosely linked, and it's hard to imagine what their audience was intended to be. Lawyers will be put off by the lack of a comprehensive legal overview of the new International Criminal Court; historians and political scientists will be disappointed by the short shrift given to the Yugoslavia and Rwanda war crimes tribunals; and the general reader probably won't have enough background to appreciate the occasional esoteric legal point. Frankly, almost any reader -- professional or layman -- would be better off with William Schabas' An Introduction to the International Criminal Court, which gives a lucid overview of the law and fills in the historical details.