Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Nelaeva & Marochkin: Law-Making Capacity of International Tribunals (In the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Jurisprudence)

G. Nelaeva & Sergei Yurievich Marochkin (Tyumen State Univ. - Law) have posted Law-Making Capacity of International Tribunals (In the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Jurisprudence) (Tyumen State University Herald (Law), No. 3, 2013, pp. 116-123). Here's the abstract:
International tribunals established in the 1990s by the UN Security Council (International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)) made a significant contribution to the development of international criminal law. For instance, one of their most important achievements is prosecution of rape and sexual assaults. These crimes have been codified in international law as crimes against women’s chastity or family honor and thanks to the case-law of the tribunals (mostly, ICTY) they have been viewed as crimes against sexual autonomy of an individual and as much serious as murder. The article looks at the case-law of the ICTY where rape and sexual violence were tried as falling within the category of war crimes (namely, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and torture) even if the explicit prohibition of the crime was included only in Article 5 (“crimes against humanity”) of the ICTY Statute. Decisions of the tribunals have served as a basis for provisions of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and as an example of formation of new international law norms by means of judicial decisions.