Author Archive for allison-danner
Doing Something about Darfur?
posted by Allison Danner
There has been a lot of anxiety, but little concrete action, from nation-states about the crimes committed in the Darfur region of Sudan. The powerful Security Council, in particular, has been woefully ineffective. While the U.S. Congress adopted a resolution in 2004 declaring the situation a “genocide,” China has played spoiler in the U.N. body, protecting Sudan from more concrete censure.
The one thing the Security Council could agree on was handing the problem off to the fledgling International Criminal Court (ICC). Even the United States, which for a time played arch enemy to the court, declined to veto the 2005 Security Council resolution referring the Darfur situation to the ICC. Given the hostility of the U.S. to the court, this failure to veto the resolution represented a major victory for the institution.
This referral, however, has had little effect on the crisis in Darfur. The long arm of international law has not yet reached far into the region. Although the ICC’s prosecutor has dutifully reported to the Security Council every six months about the progress of his investigation, he has thus far had fairly little to say.
To be fair, both the refusal of Sudanese authorities to allow the prosecutor to investigate in Darfur and the ongoing crisis in the region have made prosecuting potential perpetrators difficult. Nevertheless, there has been a growing sense of frustration with the desultory pace of the ICC’s investigation. The most visible manifestation of this discontent consists of documents requested by the ICC judge assigned to the investigation and submitted by Louise Arbour, the former prosecutor of the Yugoslav Tribunal (and now UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), and Antonio Cassese, the former president of the Yugoslav Tribunal and author of the UN’s report on Darfur. Each of these documents takes issue with the prosecutor’s conclusion that concerns over victim security precluded him from going forward with prosecutions. The prosecutor responded, disputing the conclusions of the Cassese and Arbour briefs and setting out his strategy on the Darfur investigation.
The ICC’s prosecutor finally has something to say beyond vague promises of future action. He announced this week that he plans to present his first case on Darfur to the ICC’s judges within a matter of days. This is an important step for the ICC. Whether the beginning of actual prosecutions for crimes committed in Darfur will help mitigate the human catastrophe occurring there is an open question. Certainly criminal prosecutions, standing alone, can do little in the short term. If they help galvanize political will to address the crisis, however, they may prove a critical step toward reaching the political solution that the inhabitants of Darfur desperately need.
January 24, 2007 at 10:43 am
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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The Pitfalls of Punishment
posted by Allison Danner
Thank you for the opportunity to join Concurring Opinions as a guest blogger for this month.
At the risk of repetition, I would like to continue the conversation begun by Dan and Deven about the recent execution of Saddam Hussein.
Dan has described his discomfort with his reaction to the imposition of the death penalty on Saddam. Indeed, as the New York Times has noted, the death penalty has been a sticking point for potential supporters of the tribunal, both in other countries and in international organizations. The cold shoulder given to the Iraqi court by much of the world has undermined the tribunal’s status as an exemplar of the increasing turn toward legal accountability for mass crimes.
Nevertheless, the furor over the imposition of the death penalty in the Iraqi case masks a greater systemic problem with international criminal law. While the applicable law and procedure of the field have been greatly clarified in the past decade, the appropriate punishment for transgressions of its norms remains an incoherent morass.
January 3, 2007 at 12:29 am
Posted in: Criminal Law, International & Comparative Law
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