The ‘Ideal’ Victim of International Criminal Law

Schwöbel-Patel, Christine

doi:10.1093/ejil/chy056

Cited by 31 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…As Schwöbel-Patel's work on victimhood elucidates, the practice of international criminal justice tends to coalesce around such points of focus, which tend to express an idealised construction of victimhood accompanied by certain aesthetic -spectacularised -qualities. 85 Regarding this apparent rejection of a claimed icc power to prosecute arms traders, there was some sense of legal humility among the icc judges and lawyers insofar as they perceived the external boundaries of the icc's mandate and willingness to cede ownership to other sites of authority. They did not view the Court as the site for these cases.…”

Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Humility and Perceptions of Power in International Criminal Justice

Palmer

Hamilton

2022

Int. Crim. Law Rev.

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This article examines how judges and lawyers working in international criminal courts see their authority in relation to power exerted by states, international organisations and private actors. We draw together ethnographic research inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ictr) and the International Criminal Court (icc) that examined perceptions of the interactions among local, national and international legal regimes and the potential for accomplice liability for arms traders under international criminal law. Overall, we show that the legal actors in these courts routinely understood their power as severely limited by concurrent sites of private and public authority. Building on ideas of legal humility, we argue that this should be understood as ‘selective humility’. This humility demonstrated a reticence among these legal actors about what internationalised courts can achieve while offering an argumentative defence against critiques of this legal practice.

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Section: 1mentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Humility and Perceptions of Power in International Criminal Justice

Palmer

Hamilton

2022

Int. Crim. Law Rev.

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“…This maps onto Mamdani's (2009) critique of the representations of violence in Darfur, where he argues that particular notions of the Arab perpetrator, in the minds of largely American lobby groups, informed their support for both military and criminal legal interventions in Sudan. In the wider international criminal law literature, these concerns are echoed and recast in the increasing attention to the role of international criminal trials in constructing idealized and racialized notions of both perpetrators and victims (Clarke, 2011(Clarke, , 2015Kendall and Nouwen, 2013;Sagan, 2010;Schwöbel-Patel, 2018).…”

Section: The Place Of Race In the Trial Of Jean Léonard Teganyamentioning

confidence: 99%

Immigration trials and international crimes: Expressing justice and performing race

Palmer

2021

Theoretical Criminology

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This article examines the performative collisions between the wrong of genocide and the invocation of this international crime as a means to secure carceral control of borders. Drawing on courtroom observations, legal transcripts and the media coverage of an immigration trial in the United States, the article explores the performative relationship between international criminal law and immigration law. It argues that this relationship helped to construct and racialize the category of the ‘criminalized migrant’ while establishing the perceived ‘civility’ of criminal law as a primary means of enacting domestic border control. While race was never made explicit in the trial, it emerged in a fractured but significant way, as the horror of the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi reinforced the wrong of violating immigration law.

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“…van Dijk's (1999) study, mentioned above, thus argues that Christie's model of the ideal victim seems largely appropriate in the context of international crimes, although in crucial ways it is shaped by media attention. Here we also encounter the paradox described by Christie (2018/1986): victims have to be vulnerable in order to seem deserving of victim status, yet strong and powerful enough to gain it and fend off counter-claims (see also Schwöbel-Patel, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…‘Innocent’ victims are ‘at the apex of a hierarchy of victimhood’ and become ‘a symbol around which contested notions of past violence and suffering are constructed and reproduced’ (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2012: 532). van Dijk (1999) and Schwobel-Patel’s (2018) studies show that notions of innocence and ideal victimhood also inform how international crimes are understood. Conflicts where distinctions between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ (van Dijk, 1999: 169) are clear and simple attract greater media attention and enable victims to publicize their fate and thus ‘benefit’ from their status as victims.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drug Violence, War-Crime Distinction, and Hierarchies of Victimhood

Franko

Goyes

2022

Social & Legal Studies

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Issues related to victimhood are central to transitional justice and international criminal justice. However, processes of transitional justice do not usually include victims of drug-related violence, despite the fact that in several Latin American countries deaths caused by cartel violence easily meet criteria of civil war. This article's central argument is that distinctions between victims of war and victims of what is often termed conventional crime are of great importance to notions of legitimate victimhood in transitional contexts. Taking Colombia's Victims’ Law (2011) as a case study, we argue that the binary distinction between war and crime fails to address the needs of victims of mass drug violence and creates a hierarchy among victims. This has important symbolic, legal and material implications for those who find themselves in the less favoured category. Victims of drug related violence struggle to access justice and to make their voices heard in public discourses about violence. We argue that the current understanding of mass drug violence as ‘conventional crime’ represents a Northern perspective on violence, which can be counter-productive when used uncritically in Southern contexts.

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The ‘Ideal’ Victim of International Criminal Law

Abstract: Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.

Cited by 31 publications

References 11 publications

Legal Humility and Perceptions of Power in International Criminal Justice

Legal Humility and Perceptions of Power in International Criminal Justice

Immigration trials and international crimes: Expressing justice and performing race

Drug Violence, War-Crime Distinction, and Hierarchies of Victimhood

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