Internationalized Criminal Courts and Tribunals: Sierra Leone, East Timor, Kosovo, and Cambodia.

• Author: Borgo
• Position: Rese

Internationalized Criminal Courts and Tribunals: Sierra Leone, East Timor, Kosovo, and Cambodia.

Cesare P.R. Romano, Andre Nollkaemper and Jann K. Kleffner (eds.) Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004; 550 pp.

Historically, prosecution of international crimes has been the task of national courts; however, under international law prosecution by national courts presents two fundamental problems. First, national courts are often far from impartial, especially when they have to adjudicate on their own states' international crimes. Second, prosecuting international crimes can be politically and materially a burdensome exercise.

For this reason, Nuremberg and Tokyo military tribunals, established in the wake of the Second World War to prosecute German and Japanese crimes, broke new ground and presented us the first generation of international courts. It took several decades for the idea of international prosecution to find broad acceptance and until the United Nations Security Council brought about the second generation of international courts with the establishment of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC).

At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, a new generation of criminal justice bodies emerged to prosecute suspects of international crimes. Designed to address the weaknesses of both international and domestic criminal courts, they combine national and international elements. Their bench consists of both international and national judges that can apply both international and national law. These features justify treating them together as "internationalized" criminal courts and tribunals (the adjective adopted by the editors as opposed to the adjectives "hybrid" or "mixed", which are sometimes used in literature). The book "Internationalized Criminal Courts and Tribunals: Sierra Leone, East Timor, Kosovo, and Cambodia" addresses three active and one anticipated jurisdiction of this kind: the Serious Crimes Panels in the District Court of Dili (East Timor); the 'Regulation 64' Panels in the courts of Kosovo; the Special Court for Sierra Leone; and the so-called Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.

The book originates in a conference on internationalized criminal courts and tribunals held in Amsterdam in January 2002 and jointly organized by "No Peace Without Justice", the Pioneer Project on Interactions between National and International Law at the Amsterdam Center on International Law, University of Amsterdam, and the Project on International Courts and Tribunals, at New York University and University College, London.

The book consists of a set of twenty-one papers. Authors bring together academics from the fields of general international law and international criminal law as well as officials and practitioners with experience in the operation of internationalized criminal courts and tribunals. The book also contains a list of acronyms, table of cases, table of treaties, table of international instruments, tables of domestic laws, a more than selective bibliography, and a list of websites which make the work much easier for students and researchers.

The book is divided into Part I: Introduction; Part II: Internationalized Criminal Courts and Tribunals which analyzed the cases of Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone and Cambodia; Part III: Cross-Cutting Aspects which is divided into Institution Building, Law and Procedure and Relationship with Third Entities: National Courts, Third States, and the ICC; and ends with a paper in the manner of conclusions entitled "Internationalized Courts: Better Than Nothing ...".

In the...