Responsibility on Trial
Liability Standards in International Criminal Law

Explores the political and legal dilemmas arising from the foundational principle of international criminal justice: individual criminal responsibility.

Liana Georgieva Minkova (Author)

9781009320177, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 February 2023

304 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 2.4 cm, 0.71 kg

Establishing individual criminal responsibility for mass atrocities is the foundational principle of international criminal justice, but this process is highly complex, and is accompanied by political and legal dilemmas about its operation. The book examines the drafting, interpretation, and application of the rules for assessing individual criminal responsibility as those rules emerge from the intense contestations among judges, lawyers, and academics within the legal field. Focusing on the International Criminal Court (ICC), the book provides a rich analysis of the international debates around questions of criminal responsibility by interrogating formal legal documents and legal scholarship alongside more candid accounts (interviews, memoirs, minutes). These debates are of key importance for international criminal law and global justice because how criminal responsibility laws are construed in practice determines which conduct merits punishment and, ultimately, demarcates the boundaries of what are considered the 'gravest' acts that 'shock' humanity.

1. Introduction: ICL between legalism and critique
2. The international legal field: a practice-based perspective
3. The international criminal justice field from within: demarcating the debates on criminal responsibility
4. Before Rome: common law influence and the merging of morality and legality
5. Drafting the Rome statute: the battleground of ideas about criminal responsibility
6. Interpreting the Rome statute: a newfound emphasis on criminal law theory
7. An overview of ICC cases: applying the principled approach to criminal responsibility in practice
8. The road to acquittals: Bemba and Gbagbo and Blé Goudé
9. The road to convictions: Ntaganda and Ongwen
10. Concluding Remarks
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Criminal law & procedure [LNF], Laws of Specific jurisdictions [LN], Law [L]