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The International Criminal Court has institutionalized the concept of individual responsibility for human rights violations. The jurisprudence of international criminal law has developed along with the institution. Affirmative defenses in the mitigation of punishment or avoidance of responsibility are becoming increasingly important in international criminal procedure. We contend that diminished culpability based on advances in neuroscience provides the most challenging set of choices for the international legal community. Of the variety of affirmative defenses, emerging neuroscience-based defense provide the most challenging set of choices for the international legal community. The Esad Landzo case at the ICTY brings these challenges into focus. We discuss the difficult choices the International Criminal Court will have to make to balance the rights and needs of the victims and the due process rights of the accused.

This chapter examines the delicate balance achieved by apex courts in new democracies when dealing with impunity for rights violations during times of transitional justice. While international law has clearly rejected amnesties for past rights violations, domestic politics sometimes incorporate amnesties as part of larger peace settlements. This puts courts in the difficult situation of balancing the competing demands of law and politics. Courts have achieved equipoise in this situation by adopting substantive interpretations and procedural approaches that use international law’s rights-based language but without implementing international law’s restrictions on amnesties. In many cases, courts do this without acknowledging the necessarily pragmatic nature of their decisions. In fact, oftentimes courts find ways of avoiding having to make any substantive decision, effectively removing themselves from a dispute that could call into question their adherence to international legal norms that transcend politics. In doing so, they empower political actors to continue down the road toward negotiated peace settlements, while at the same time protecting the courts’ legitimacy as institutions uniquely situated to protect international human rights norms – including those they have effectively deemphasized in the process.

Global mobility remains one of the most pressing challenges of our times. Countries in the north are turning to major ‘sending’ countries in the south to secure their cooperation in controlling their borders and in repatriation processes. By explicitly linking migration to global security threats and weak governance, these migration control initiatives are justified by development goals and sometimes financed by official development assistance (ODA). By connecting criminology with international development scholarship, this chapter seeks to advance our understanding of the novel intersections between criminal justice, security and development to govern mass migration. Focusing on UK policies and the analysis of specific programmes, it interrogates what does the sustainable development goal (10.7) of facilitating ‘orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration’ concretely entail? And to what extent does the language of ‘managed migration’ legitimise restrictive border controls policies and even conflict with other global development goals?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contours of police integrity among Chinese police officers. Specifically, this study explores how Chinese police evaluate integrity based on official policy governing interactions, discipline governing infractions, views of seriousness, and willingness to inform when others engage in misconduct.

In total, 353 police officers were surveyed representing those attending in-service training program at a Chinese police university in May 2015. Questionnaires containing 11 scenarios describing police misbehaviors were distributed to officers during classes.

There was a strong correlation between officers’ perceptions of rule-violation, misconduct seriousness, discipline, and willingness to report. Additionally, preliminary results suggest there exists a code of silence among Chinese officers, and that Chinese officers hold a lenient attitude toward the use of excessive force.

This study utilizes a convenient sample, which restricts the generalizability of the results.

The results indicate the existence of code of silence among Chinese officers and their lenient attitude toward the use of excessive force.

Although there has been a growing body of research examining police integrity in both western democracies and transitional societies, China as the largest developing nation in the world and with a unique police system (falls somewhere between the centralized model and the integrated model) is understudied. This study addresses this gap in previous literature by exploring the contours of police integrity among Chinese police officers.

The victim’s rights movement and restorative justice (RJ) have gained momentum around the world. More laws and policies have focused on crime victims and their families. Western literature suggests that the victim’s family suffers physical, emotional, and financial tolls and that the power of the victim’s family in pursuing justice for their loved ones remains limited. This is particularly concerning within the political and legal context of the abolitionist movement, innocence project, and human rights groups’ campaigns against police torture. Grounded in the perspectives of RJ and Chinese legal culture, this study examines the victim’s family, represented by Ding and senior Yu, of the Nian Bin capital murder case. Drawing on published reports and using the thematic content analysis method, this study examines the following aspects of victim’s family in a death penalty case: 1) victim family’s physical, emotional, and financial tolls; 2) victims’ family and the criminal justice system; 3) victims’ family and the media; and 4) the relationship between the victims’ and the accused’s families. This study concludes with discussions of the competing goals of families impacted by a crime and RJ practices that would help mitigate the loss of the victim’s family and enhance their confidence in the criminal justice system.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a newly initiated strategy for international cooperation in criminal justice; specifically, the facilitation of a “Korean Desk” between the Philippines and the Republic of Korea, as a case of successful collaboration.

International efforts to formulate and implement the Korean Desk are reviewed, by collecting legal and administrative literature on its implementation.

The Korean Desk, as a newly implemented strategy to handle the increasing incidence of crime by and against Koreans in the Philippines, showed that direct communication and collaboration between police agencies significantly increased effectiveness. Creating the Korean Desk greatly assisted the resolution of criminal matters including extradition, cyber-crime, murder, robbery and others that involved Korean suspects and offenders in Korea and Philippines. The paper describes how the implementation of the Korean Desk evolved, the different roles of the Korean Desk and the police consul, and the substantial, positive outcomes of the project.

Law-enforcement agencies are constantly formulating new approaches to enhance international anti-crime efforts. The successful collaboration described in this paper provides new insights and ideas for how, through close cooperation, agencies can benefit from, and enhance, those efforts. The paper shows how direct communication between the Korean Desk and local police in the Philippines can facilitate investigations, making them efficient and timely. Evaluation of the Korean Desk suggests that it has greatly contributed to international law enforcement.

The overall steps for formulating the Korean Desk strategy and implementing it are examined.

Hybrid forms of international criminal justice have been lauded for combining the political and procedural legitimacy of international tribunals with increased attention to the local contexts where mass crimes occurred. This work critically examines the hybrid legal structure of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a novel post-conflict institution empowered to draw from both international and Sierra Leonean law. Although formally hybrid, the Court neglects domestic law in practice, suggesting that “hybridity” refers more to a rhetorical strategy aimed at legitimating its work than to its ontological status. By symbolically including and substantively excluding domestic law, the court's legal structure inadvertently resembles a colonial form of legal pluralism rather than a hybrid jurisdiction.