Implementing Punishment for Atrocities: Towards a New View on the Rehabilitation of International Criminals

• In Event: Dilemmas in Punishment: Global Perspectives

Abstract

New and emerging conflicts around the globe, together with preceding or accompanying gross human rights violations, pose a continuous challenge for international criminal justice. The practice of paramount justice actors, international criminal tribunals, indicates that maintenance of security and prevention of atrocities can hardly depend on pure condemnation of international criminals; on the contrary, it requires a broader multidisciplinary action which should principally tackle root-causes of their criminality. In this sense, purposeful prison treatment of international criminals could be seen as a potentially effective mean to achieve this goal.
Due to a distinctive sentence-enforcement system adopted by international criminal tribunals which provides that persons convicted for international crimes should serve their sentences in different national prison-systems around the world, the realities of international imprisonment pertaining to purpose, treatment programs and outcome of incarceration have so far remained secluded.
Based on the author’s extensive empirical research, this presentation will unveil advantages and flaws of the established sentence-enforcement system, in order to propose more effective measures in dealing with the etiology of international crimes.

Author

• Filip Vojta, Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law