International Crimes and the Ad Hoc Tribunals by Guénaël Mettraux Oxford: Oxford

• Author: Daniel C. Turack
• Position: Professor of Law, Capital University Law School
• Pages: 1059-1063

Page 1059

Mr. Mettraux brings a wealth of personal experience into the writing of this book, as he worked within the Chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and subsequently practiced as defense counsel before the same Tribunal. Before these practical experiences, he pursued academic qualifications in international law, and this work demonstrates how international law and criminal law mesh; it represents international criminal law from a practitioner's perspective.

As both the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) have produced a formidable body of case law on a wide range of international crimes during the past decade, and numerous procedural and jurisdictional issues have come to light in the process, the author has undertaken to appraise the administration of criminal justice and the jurisprudence developed by these two Tribunals.

It will be recalled that the ICTY was given authority to prosecute and judge categories of crimes that include serious violations of international humanitarian law, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, serious violations of the laws or customs of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Similarly, the ICTR was given responsibility to prosecute categories of crimes that included genocide and serious violations of humanitarian law in Rwanda.

In the preface, the author forewarns the reader that the law of international crimes is not a fully fledged body of law that has been judicially fine-tuned. The body of rules and principles developed have been incremental so that orders, decisions, judgments, and appeals have to be closely observed as to their temporal pronouncement, that would account for certain prevalent inconsistencies. The composite of the abovementioned constitutes what the author designates as the "jurisprudence" of the ad hoc tribunals. This large patchwork of jurisprudence contains gaps in the body of law of international crimes, and the author points them out where they exist. The book is divided into eight parts.

Page 1060

Part I, "Subject-Matter Jurisdiction of the Ad Hoc Tribunals and Applicable Law," shows that the statutes of the tribunals are slightly better than bare bones skeletons of the crimes within their jurisdictions. Hence, the application of the definitions and law of the international crimes in general, needed fine-tuning by the judges without the tribunals "legislating." To find the elements that made up the statutory crimes under international law necessitated identifying customary international law with the accompanying difficulty for the judges of locating opinio juris and state practice, and that the particular...