War And International Justice

Can war ever be just? By what right do we charge people with war crimes? Can war itself be a crime? What is a good peace treaty? Since the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, many wars have erupted, inflaming such areas as the Persian Gulf, Central Africa and Central Europe. Brutalities committed during these conflicts have sparked new interest in the ethics of war and peace. Brian Orend explores the ethics of war and peace from a Kantian perspective, emphasizing human rights protection, the rule of international law and a fully global concept of justice. Contending that Kant’s just war doctrine has not been given its due, Orend displays Kant’s theory to its fullest, impressive effect. He then completely and clearly updates Kant’s perspective for application to our time. Along the way, he criticizes pacifism and realism, explores the nature of human rights protection during wartime, and defends a theory of just war. He also looks ahead to future developments in global institutional reform using cases from the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda to illustrate his argument. Controversial and timely, perhaps the most important contribution War and International Justice: A Kantian Perspective makes is with regard to the question of justice after war. Orend offers a principled theory of war termination, making an urgent plea to reform current international law.

In this work, two former State Department lawyers provide an account of how and why justice was misapplied and mishandled throughout the peace-builders' efforts to settle the Yugoslav conflict. The text is based on their personal experience, research and interviews with key players in the process.

Exploring the evolution and operation of the international criminal justice system and highlighting the influences of politics, this book takes the reader behind the scenes of the conflict between justice and realpolitik.

Can we achieve justice during war? Should law substitute for realpolitik? Can an international court act against the global community that created it? Justice in a Time of War is a translation from the French of the first complete, behind-the-scenes story of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, from its proposal by Balkan journalist Mirko Klarin through recent developments in the first trial of its ultimate quarry, Slobodan Miloševic. It is also a meditation on the conflicting intersection of law and politics in achieving justice and peace. Le Monde’s review (November 3, 2000) of the original edition recommended Hazan’s book as a nuanced account of the Tribunal that should be a must-read for the new president of Yugoslavia. “The story Pierre Hazan tells is that of an institution which, over the course of the years, has managed to escape in large measure from the initial hidden motives and manipulations of those who created it (not only the Americans).” With insider interviews filling out every scene, author Pierre Hazan tells a chaotic story of war while the Western powers cobbled together a tribunal in order to avoid actual intervention, hoping to threaten international criminals with indictment and thereby to force an untenable peace. The international lawyers and judges for this rump world court started with nothing—no office space, no assistants, no computers, not even a budget—but they ultimately established the tribunal as an unavoidable actor in the Balkans. This development was also a reflection of the evolving political situation: the West had created the Tribunal in 1993 as an alibi in order to avoid military intervention, but in 1999, the Tribunal suddenly became useful to NATO countries as a means by which to criminalize Miloševic’s regime and to justify military intervention in Kosovo and in Serbia. Ultimately, this hastened the end of Miloševic’s rule and led the way to history’s first war crimes trial of a former president by an international tribunal. Ironically, this triumph for international law was not really intended by the Western leaders who created the court. They sought to placate, not shape, public opinion. But the determination of a handful of people working at the Tribunal transformed it into an active agent for change, paving the road for the International Criminal Court and greatly advancing international criminal law. Yet the Tribunal’s existence poses as many questions as it answers. How independent can a U.N. Tribunal be from the political powers that created it and sustain it politically and financially ? Hazan remains cautious though optimistic for the future of international justice. His history remains a cautionary tale to the reader: realizing ideals in a world enamored of realpolitik is a difficult and often haphazard activity.

Beginning in late 1945, the United States, Britain, China, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and later the Philippines, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China convened national courts to prosecute Japanese military personnel for war crimes. The defendants included ethnic Koreans and Taiwanese who had served with the armed forces as Japanese subjects. In Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East tried Japanese leaders. While the fairness of these trials has been a focus for decades, Japanese War Criminals instead argues that the most important issues arose outside the courtroom. What was the legal basis for identifying and detaining subjects, determining who should be prosecuted, collecting evidence, and granting clemency after conviction? The answers to these questions helped set the norms for transitional justice in the postwar era and today contribute to strategies for addressing problematic areas of international law. Examining the complex moral, ethical, legal, and political issues surrounding the Allied prosecution project, from the first investigations during the war to the final release of prisoners in 1958, Japanese War Criminals shows how a simple effort to punish the guilty evolved into a multidimensional struggle that muddied the assignment of criminal responsibility for war crimes. Over time, indignation in Japan over Allied military actions, particularly the deployment of the atomic bombs, eclipsed anger over Japanese atrocities, and, among the Western powers, new Cold War imperatives took hold. This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the construction of the postwar international order in Asia and to our comprehension of the difficulties of implementing transitional justice.

Billed by the international media as "the trial of the century," the Tadic case was punctuated by gripping testimony of atrocities, controversial judicial rulings, recanting star witnesses, and performances worthy of an Academy Award. What emerges is a compelling account of the historic trial which documented the full horror of the inhuman acts committed in the former Yugoslavia.

After a controversial war in which he was ousted and captured by United States forces, Saddam Hussein was arraigned before a war crimes tribunal. Slobodan Milosevic died midway through his contentious trial by an international war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Calls for intervention and war crimes trials for the massacres and rapes in Sudan's Darfur region have been loud and clear, and the United States remains fiercely opposed to the permanent International Criminal Court. Are war crimes trials impartial, apolitical forums? Has international justice for war crimes become an entrenched aspect of globalization? In Global Justice, Moghalu examines the phenomenon of war crimes trials from an unusual, political perspective—that of an anarchical international society. After a controversial war in which he was ousted and captured by United States forces, Saddam Hussein was arraigned before a war crimes tribunal. Slobodan Milosevic died midway through his contentious trial by an international war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Calls for intervention and war crimes trials for the massacres and rapes in Sudan's Darfur region have been loud and clear, and the United States remains fiercely opposed to the permanent International Criminal Court. Are war crimes trials impartial, apolitical forums? Has international justice for war crimes become an entrenched aspect of globalization? In Global Justice, Moghalu examines the phenomenon of war crimes trials from an unusual, political perspective—that of an anarchical international society. He argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, war crimes trials are neither motivated nor influenced solely by abstract notions of justice. Instead, war crimes trials are the product of the interplay of political forces that have led to an inevitable clash between globalization and sovereignty on the sensitive question of who should judge war criminals. From Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm to the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, from the trials of Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Charles Taylor to Belgium's attempts to enforce the contested doctrine of universal jurisdiction, Moghalu renders a compelling tour de force of one of the most controversial subjects in world politics. He argues that, necessary though it was, international justice has run into a crisis of legitimacy. While international trials will remain a policy option, local or regional responses to mass atrocities will prove more durable.

A nuanced discussion of why war crimes occur, what can be done to bring the perpetrators to justice, and the prospects of preventing such atrocities in the future.

When the topic of international justice did arise, discussion rarely got beyond recommendations about how nations could avoid war, as well as suggestions about when a declaration of war was morally justifiable and what sorts of methods might be used in the course of a justifiable war the topics of so-called just-war theory. Such is no longer the case.To be sure, just-war theory is reaching greater states of sophistication,much of it focused around Michael Walzer's book Just and Unjust Wars.Excerpts from Walzer's book appear here, in Part Two, along with a set of newly written chapters that deal with issues arising from the use of violence among nations. The topics of these chapters are foreign interventionism and states' rights, deterrence and the threat of nuclear reprisal, and terrorism.But issues of international justice other than just-war theory have been discussed by an an ever-increasing group of twentieth-century scholars. These issues deal with what might be called (for lack of a better term) distributive justice, which concerns the distribution of the world's natural resources and the goods produced by laborers across the world, as well as the duties,rights, and liberties possessed by individuals. How such items ought to be distributed within nation-states has been discussed extensively by social and political philosophers. Only in recent years has any attention been paid to the proper distribution of goods internationally. The chapters in Part One all do so. With one exception, all of these chapters are written for this volume. The exception is an excerpt from Charles Beitz's book PoliticalTheory and International Relations, Part Three of which is reproduced here almost in its entirety. The other chapters in this part are devoted to the topics of justice and the distribution of the world's resources, the obligation to assist the needy, the responsibilities of international corporations, and justice and the global environment.

This volume argues that a wide range of policies in the international system today – economic sanctions, military intervention, and counter terrorism policy – are part of a ‘punitive ethos’ that has arisen since the end of the Cold War.