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Mark Osiel, ABF Visiting Faculty & University of Iowa- "After International Law: Non-Juridical Responses to Mass Atrocity"

  • When: December 1, 2010, 12–1:30 pm
  • Where: Woods Conference Center, 750 N Lake Shore Drive, 4th Floor

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Mark Osiel
ABF Visiting Faculty
Aliber Family Chair, College of Law, Univ. of Iowa

After International Law: Non-Juridical Responses to Mass Atrocity

Some of the most prominent efforts to restrain and redress mass atrocities in our time are non-legal, extra-judicial, and in particular rely not at all on application of international law by international courts.  Why is this so, and what does it mean for assessing the proper place of international law – and its alternatives -- in the world’s response to mass atrocity?  This study examines five such non-juridical initiatives: the organized international movements seeking, 1) to acknowledge a “responsibility to protect” prospective victims from atrocity, 2) to reduce unintentional civilian casualties in war, increasingly deemed “disproportionate,” 3) effective civil remediation (e.g., monetary compensation) of atrocity victims by perpetrator-states, 4) official state apology for past genocidal policies and, 5) greater social responsibility by foreign corporations operating in repressive states whose armed forces commit atrocities in apparent support of such investment.  For reasons both material and ideal, these several initiatives all find their chief inspiration and institutional footing in social forces and political processes largely insusceptible by nature to international juridification.  Any adequate theory of international criminal justice must come to terms with this palpable fact, and delimit law’s scope accordingly within it.

 

To read the book introduction to After International Law: Non-Juridical Responses to Mass Atrocity click here

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