International Law as Globalisation: The Justice Conundrum

International criminal law is commonly contextualized by international lawyers against the backdrop of ‘globalization’, and international legal scholars have recognized that international criminal justice is both a symptom and a driver of this phenomenon. This book illustrates how the core challenges confronting the creation and delivery of international criminal justice are shaped by processes of globalization.

This book explores how the intersection between national and global legal processes, and international and hybrid tribunals, impacts the way in which international criminal justice is delivered. The books draws on a number of sources including extensive empirical research conducted by the author at ICTR and the emerging body of international socio-legal scholarship which is focussed primarily on ICTY. It shows how international criminal courts must establish their legitimacy within the context of a critique that is emerging from globalization discourse, and examines how legal actors bring deeply rooted local conceptions of the requisites of fair trial process, and of the roles required of them to deliver justice, to global trial practice. It will goes on to look at how, with the advent of individual prosecutions in the international legal order, the selection procedure for judges has shifted from being state-centric to cosmopolitan, and identify the tensions in achieving judicial and prosecutorial independence within the web of transnational networks with whom the bench and international bar must engage, and of which they are themselves members. The book concludes with practical recommendations for how the international criminal justice system can respond more proactively and efficiently to ‘globalized’ international legal practice.