Nobuo Hayashi and Cecilia M. Bailliet (eds), The Legitimacy of International Criminal Tribunals

Le résumé fourni par la source

The concept of legitimacy — a contested term within the discipline of international criminal law — is increasingly being deployed among international lawyers to frame the limits and potential of international criminal courts. The Legitimacy of International Criminal Tribunals, an edited collection, makes an important and welcome contribution to a small but growing body of scholarship.1 Prompted by a concern with the significant pressure being placed on international criminal courts, particularly the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the foremost institution driving international criminal law, the contributors engage with legitimacy both critically and from a multidisciplinary perspective. The significance of this book lies in its broad range of discussion not only on the relevance, scope and usefulness of legitimacy as a concept as well as a criterion for assessing the performance of international criminal courts, but also as a discourse that increasingly animates the discipline itself. The book is split into five parts. The first part examines a range of issues from normative questions about the concept’s meaning — or lack thereof — to the limits and possibilities of legitimacy discourse in international criminal law. In the third chapter, rather than searching for a singular criterion of legitimacy, Sergey Vasiliev argues that overlapping and divergent typologies of legitimacy provide scope to enrich international criminal law through broader cross-disciplinary dialogue.2 In the fourth chapter, Asad Kiyani draws attention to the ‘double-edged’ nature of legitimacy discourse through exposing selectivity in international criminal law, while at the same time, showing deference to powerful states and claims of power.3 In contrast, the first chapter, authored by Larry May and Shannon Fyfe, explores traditional aspects of legitimacy, such as source legitimacy, arising from the lack of a legislature or democratically authorized courts. May and Fyfe argue in favour of a ‘bootstrapping’ approach which combines different sources to establish the legitimacy of international criminal courts.4 Similarly, in the second chapter, Silje Aambø Langvatn and Theresa Squatrito propose a multidimensional assessment of legitimacy by reference to three elements: ‘how a court came into being’; the court’s adherence with recognized procedures; and the effectiveness of the court’s results.5

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.