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...the Department Political Science at Eastern Illinois University, are frequent collaborators on scholarly work concerning criminal tribunals. Their co-authored articles and joint conference presentations on assorted aspects of this topic have culminated in Designing Criminal Tribunals, a book that examines various ad hoc tribunals, primarily those created since the end of the Cold War. These tribunals include the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), both international tribunals; the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), and the Special Crimes Panel for East Timor (SCPET), all mixed tribunals; and the Indonesian Human Rights Court (IHRC), a purely domestic court.
Observing that "[i]nternational law, tribunals and law enforcement mechanisms have developed unevenly in the 20th century as a reflection of political realities," (1) Roper and Barria argue "that legal concerns are embedded within a political process (either domestic or international) in which rights and obligations are redefined based on political necessity." (2) This point, vocalized by many others in the literature on international criminal law and transitional justice, reflects a realist view of international relations that highlights the epiphenomenal nature, or secondary role, of international law vis-a-vis world politics. And the authors certainly make their case, by convincingly showing that the general evolution in tribunal construction since the early 1990s--from purely international to mixed to purely domestic--reflects states' changing preferences based on matters quite separate from principles of law and justice, such as financial considerations and assertions of state sovereignty.
While Designing Criminal Tribunals provides important information and analysis about several critical aspects of its six key case studies, including their financial bases and completion strategies (Chapters Five and Six, respectively, which are the two strongest chapters), it suffers from two major weaknesses. The first is that the book adds little original research to this important topic. By drawing heavily upon secondary sources, Roper and Barria deliver little more than a summary of the existing literature on this topic.
The second major weakness of the book is that it is methodologically unsound. The logic is arbitrary, and readers are left pondering the true focus of the project and its rationale. One methodological problem of this book is its narrow transitional...
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More articles from Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal
Law and Disorder in the Postcolony.(Book review), January 01, 2007
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