Shane Darcy awarded Journal of International Criminal Justice Prize

From left, Judge Cassese, Shane Darcy, Judge Garzonm Johan David Michels and Sandesh Sivakumaran.

Dr Shane Darcy, currently a lecturer and formerly a doctoral student at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, has been awarded the prestigious Journal of International Criminal Justice Prize 2010. The prize is awarded annually for the best article by a younger scholar in this leading international journal. This year the honour was awarded ex aequo to Dr Shane Darcy and Johan David Michels. Shane’s article was entitled ‘Prosecuting the War Crime of Collective Punishment: Is It Time to Amend the Rome Statute?’

In awarding the prize, the Board of Editors of the journal commended the work for furthering critical discussion of the substantive and procedural law practiced before international criminal courts and tribunals. They praised Dr Darcy for 'his lucid and thought-provoking reading of the customary and conventional basis of the offence of collective punishment, its judicial application by the Special Court of Sierra Leone and the implications of its omission from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court'.

The prize was awarded at a ceremony convened at the Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights in Geneva on 10 March 2011, presided over by Judge Antonio Cassese, the President of the Special Tribunal of Lebanon, and Judge Baltasar Garzón, magistrate at the Audiencia Nacional in Spain, currently working at the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.