The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda are the first, post Cold War international criminal tribunals convicting perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Their sentencing practice has been largely criticized as inconsistent. This quantitative study addresses the criticism and empirically investigates the consistency of international sentencing. The extent to which the selected factors predict sentence length is tested in a multiple regression analysis. The analysis suggests that similar, legally relevant patterns have emerged in the sentencing practice of both tribunals. Sentencing in international criminal practice does not appear to be less consistent than sentencing under domestic jurisdictions.
Only a very small percentage of the perpetrators convicted by international criminal courts and tribunals are women. This raises the question as to whether women are less evil than men. Within the literature it is generally assumed that the genocide in Rwanda was unprecedented in relation to the role played by women, and that it is the first and only period of mass violence in which many women were involved. This explorative study however, shows that women have played a much larger role than we have generally assumed so far and that women can be just as evil as men – although it indeed seems true that generally far less women than men are involved in mass atrocities. There is a clear gender bias in the portrayal of female perpetrators as sadists, abnormal or lacking agency, but it can be questioned whether female perpetrators are less ordinary than male perpetrators.
The main aim of the International Criminal Court (icc) is to prosecute the most serious crimes of concern to the international community. One of the most valued features of the icc is the independent position of the Prosecutor in selecting situations and cases to investigate. The Prosecutor, however, has been heavily criticized for his selection policy and countries from the African Union even threatened to withdraw from the icc because of its alleged bias and unfair focus on African political leaders. In this article we present the results of our explorative study in which we empirically evaluate the situations selection policy of the icc Prosecutor. We conclude that given the icc’s limited jurisdictional reach, the Prosecutor is generally focusing on the gravest situations where international crimes are supposedly committed.
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