PhD studies in human rights: New judgments

Wednesday 5 March 2008

New judgments

Some important new judgments have been issued in the past week.
The European Court of Human Rights delivered a ruling in a case involving transfer (refoulement) of an alleged terrorist from Italy to Tunisia (Saadi v. Italy, http://www.echr.coe.int/ECHR/EN/Header/Case-Law/HUDOC/HUDOC+database/). The United Kingdom had intervened asking the Court to revisit its ruling of more than a decade ago in Chahal. According to Chahal, there can be no exception to the prohibition of sending an individual to a country where he or she would be subject to torture. The United Kingdom hoped the Court might temper its words, given the post 9/11 context, but last week’s decision confirmed that there are no exceptions to the rule. This was a unanimous judgment of a Grand Chamber of the Court. In international human rights law, it doesn't get any stronger.
Also of interest is the brief discussion of diplomatic assurances, because the Court seems to think they may be relevant in assessing the risk of torture. Others, such as the Special Rapporteur on Torture and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, have considered diplomatic assurances that a person will not be tortured to be worthless. I did a paper on the subject a little more than a year ago for a seminar organised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (http://www.osce.org/documents/odihr/2007/02/23424_en.pdf).
The Appeals Chamber of the Special Court for Sierra Leone issued its judgment in the case of three leaders of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council yesterday. The judgment overturns a Trial Chamber finding that refused to treat ‘forced marriage’ as a distinct form of crimes against humanity. See: http://www.sc-sl.org/AFRC.html.

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William A. Schabas is professor of international law at Middlesex University in London. He is also professor of international criminal law and human rights at Leiden University, emeritus professor human rights law at the Irish Centre for Human Rights of the National University of Ireland Galway, and an honorary professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing and Wuhan University. He is the author of more than 20 books and 300 journal articles, on such subjects as the abolition of capital punishment, genocide and the international criminal tribunals. Professor Schabas was a member of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation in Human Rights and president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He serves as president of the Irish Branch of the International Law Association chair of the Institute for International Criminal Investigation. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Here is the full c.v.

Dr Yvonne McDermott is Senior Lecturer in Law at Bangor University, UK, where she is also Director of Teaching and Learning and Co-Director of the Bangor Centre for International Law. Yvonne is a graduate of the National University of Ireland, Galway (B. Corp. Law, LL.B.), Leiden University (LL.M. cum laude) and the Irish Centre for Human Rights (Ph.D.). Her research focuses on fair trial rights, international criminal procedure and international criminal law. She is the author of Fairness in International Criminal Trials (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Niamh Hayes has been the Head of Office for the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI) in The Hague since September 2012. She is about to complete her Ph.D. on the investigation and prosecution of sexual violence by international criminal tribunals at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway. She previously worked for Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice as a legal consultant, and as an intern for the defence at the ICTY in the Karadzic case. She has lectured on international criminal law and international law at Trinity College Dublin and, along with Prof. William Schabas and Dr. Yvonne McDermott, is a co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to International Criminal Law: Critical Perspectives (Ashgate, 2013). She is the author of over 45 case reports for the Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law and has published numerous articles and book chapters on the investigation and prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence as international crimes.

Joseph Powderly is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. Between September 2008 and January 2010, he was a Doctoral Fellow/Researcher at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, where he worked, among other projects, on a Irish Government-funded investigation and report into the possible perpetration of crimes against humanity against the Rohingya people of North Rakhine State, Burma/Myanmar. He is currently in the process of completing his doctoral research which looks at the impact of theories of judicial interpretation on the development of international criminal and international humanitarian law. The central thesis aims to identify and analyze the potential emergence of a specific theory of interpretation within the sphere of judicial creativity. Along with Dr. Shane Darcy of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, he is co-editor of and contributor to the edited collection Judicial Creativity in International Criminal Tribunals which was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. He has written over 80 case-reports for the Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law, as well as numerous book chapters and academic articles on topics ranging from the principle of complementarity to Irish involvement in the drafting of the Geneva Conventions. In December 2010, he was appointed Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Criminal Law Forum. His research interests while focusing on international criminal and international humanitarian law also include topics such as the history of international law and freedom of expression.