Forms of responsibility in international criminal law
1. Introduction 2. Joint criminal enterprise 3. Superior responsibility 4. Complicity and aiding and abetting 5. Planning, instigating and ordering 6. Concurrent convictions and sentencing 7. Conclusion 8. Annexes.
Criminal trials, economic dimensions of state crime, and the politics of time in international criminal law : a German-Argentine constellation
In the past thirty years, International Criminal Law (ICL) has established itself 
as an influential framework through which claims for justice in relation to the 
past can be mediated. This thesis offers a critique of the particular way in 
which ICL links history, law and justice. To this end, it contrasts a transitional 
justice perspective on trials in response to state crime, with one that looks at 
such trials as sites of competing politics of time. While the former focuses on 
the stabilisation of political authority, the later privileges its destabilisation. 
This perspective is then brought to bear on two sets of trials. These are, on 
the one hand, the trials of German industrialists conducted by the Allies in 
the wake of World War II (1939-1945) and, on the other hand,the ongoing 
trials in Argentina which seek to address the economic dimensions of the last 
Argentinian dictatorship (1976-1983). 
Through the reading of these trials, ICL is shown to be a liberal concept of 
historical justice, not (merely) because it focuses on individual responsibility 
or because it seeks to foster the liberal rule of law, but, more importantly, 
because it understands the economic dimensions of state crime according to 
the ontological separation of the state and the economic which is inherited 
from political liberalism. As a consequence, ICL tends to authorise a liberal 
democratic order, while sidelining other political imaginaries and related claims 
to justice, especially those that would involve a reshaping of the political 
economy on which liberalism rests. 
This argument is developed in two parts. The first part, consisting of three 
chapters, contrasts what has become the predominant perspective from which 
to study trials in response to state crime, namely transitional justice, with a 
theoretical framework inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin – in particular, 
his philosophy of history and his critique of violence. The central difference 
between these approaches, this thesis will argue, lies with the way in which 
each conceives of the promise of justice that comes with the memory of past 
violence. Transitional justice literature links the duty to remember past 
violence to the promise of fostering a particular juridico-political order, namely 
the liberal rule of law. Walter Benjamin, by contrast, is interested in the past’s 
ability to expose the foundational violence of the present juridico-political 
order. Against this backdrop, the promise of trials in response to state crime 
can be located only at the place, where they unearth ‘rags of history’ that, if read, expose not only the the violence of the past, but also that of the present, 
thereby opening it anew for contestation. 
Chapters Four, Five and Six put this theoretical framework to work in close 
readings of several criminal trials which deal with the economic dimensions 
of state crime conducted in post-World War II Germany and contemporary 
Argentina. These readings bring into relief the way in which the ontological 
underpinnings of political liberalism – such as the separation of the economic 
from the political, and the categorisation of violence according to sanctioned 
and non-sanctioned manifestations – structures the way that ICL makes sense 
of the economic dimensions of state crime.
Constructing a Hierarchy of Crimes in International Criminal Law Sentencing
This Article looks at sentencing in international criminal law. Based primarily on the statutes and decisions of the current International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) (collectively, the Tribunals), the Article focuses on one critical aspect of sentencing-how judges should assess the harm caused by the perpetration of international crimes. The Tribunals' judges have great discretion in imposing sentences. All crimes within their jurisdiction may be punished with terms ranging from one day to life imprisonment. There are few precedents for the Tribunals' work, and this structure has resulted in a lack of uniformity in sentencing decisions, both in sentence length and in methodology. This article proposes a framework for evaluating the harm associated with the different kinds of crimes within the jurisdiction of the Tribunals. The crimes within the jurisdiction of these Tribunals have two sets of elements: the chapeau, which confers international jurisdiction over the offense, and the enumerated acts, which resemble domestic crimes. The ICTY currently considers only the harm associated with the enumerated act when imposing an appropriate sentence. This Article argues that it is critical that the Tribunals should consider the chapeau elements in their harm determinations for two reasons. First, these international elements encode important information about the secondary harms caused by the offenses. Second, they reflect the norms underlying the internationalization of the crime and reinforce the distinction between international and domestic offenses. This approach yields two results important for international criminal law. It provides a relatively rule-like sentencing methodology that will increase the consistency and ultimately the legitimacy of international criminal law. Furthermore, by examining the differences between international and domestic crimes, it illuminates the purpose of international criminalization and advances a meaningful distinction between the two enforcement regimes.