Frédéric Mégret
Biographic Data
| ID | 2163763 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Frédéric Mégret |
| GIVEN NAMES | Frédéric |
| FAMILY NAME | Mégret |
| SIGNATURE | MÉGRET F |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1220-4903 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects
Responding to ever-increasing pressures of migration, states, supranational, and subnational actors deploy complex moves and maneuvers to reconfigure borders, rights, and territory, giving rise to a changing legal cartography of international relations and international law. The purpose of this volume is to study this new reconfiguration of rights, territoriality, and jurisdiction at the empirical and normative levels and to examine its implicati…
The Travel Visa as the Ubiquitous Legal Infrastructure of Everyday Global Mobility Arbitrariness
Much work has been produced on the passport and on exceptional regimes of mobility, notably asylum or permanent immigration. There has, by contrast, been less research on that intermediary, ubiquitous legal device that is the visa, a fundamental manifestation of state discretion, a major source of arbitrariness, and a constant assertion of power over moving bodies. The visa is a manifestation of and is embedded in a deeper infrastructure of limit…
Immunities of Foreign Officials for International Crimes
This article analyses the elusive search to restrict immunities for foreign officials accused of international crimes as a form of strategic litigation. It emphasizes how litigation ‘constitutes’ legal reality beyond particular victories. Problematizing ‘success’ in litigation makes it possible to pay attention to unintended effects and even perverse outcomes of certain strategic routes. A proper understanding of success as more than victory is t…
Massive Violence Against Civilians in War
Armed conflicts have increasingly been characterized by a phenomenon of massive violence against civilians. Beyond a certain point, the question becomes whether such violence is properly characterized as incidental to the pursuit of hostilities or should be seen as conceptually detached from it. This article looks at the competing cases for dealing with this phenomenon of massive violence against civilians from the perspective of war crimes or cr…
Transitional justice for the “war on terror?”
More than 20 years after the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing “war on terror,” there is still very little comprehension of what its transitional justice implications might be. This article interrogates the transitional justice silence over the legacies of the war on terror as a way of problematizing both the war on terror and dominant liberal transitional justice paradigms. It charts how both paradigms have often failed to intersect, how some existin…
Ban on religious symbols in the public service
Bill 21 is a highly contested law adopted in Quebec that bans certain civil servants from wearing religious symbols in the exercise of their duties. Rather than analyse Bill 21 on its merits, the article treats it as a test case for global legal pluralism, examining how the validity of the law from an international perspective depends on the frames one uses to analyse it. It finds that a basic tension permeates the entire debate between a univers…
We Will Not Go to the Trenches!” 1 the “ fusillés pour l’exemple ,” Military Disobedience, and Soldiers’ Right to Life
To what extent are soldiers required to accept grave dangers and what might be the implications of their disobedience to orders for a culture of peace? In recent years, soldiers’ rights have come under renewed interest as a result of certain judicial decisions that recognize their right to life, even in combat situations. This article traces this sensitivity to an historical precedent that has heretofore attracted little attention in the English‐…
The Independence of Justice in the Cauldron of International Relations
This article analysesa series of judicial crises involving the investigation, arrest and prosecution of prominent foreign nationals. Such crises have in common that they imperil the independence of justice in novel, transnational ways. They are the product of cultural misunderstandings, including the incredulity of foreign authoritarian States that the judiciary of the forum State is indeed independent. They raise dilemmas for States in seeking t…
Ejil Roll of Honour; 2021 Ejil Peer Reviewer Prize; Changes in the Masthead; Germany v Italy
International Shanghai’ (1863–1931)
At the intersection of imperial rule and private power, Shanghai rose to international prominence in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It did so by taking advantage of the extraterritorial status and the dynamic, cosmopolitan population of the International Settlement. In evaluating the fate of the Shanghai Municipal Council, we seek to ascertain how private authority could have been constituted on a trans…
Are There “Inherently Sovereign Functions” in International Law
Privatization of functions that were traditionally considered sovereign has reached new heights. International lawyers have responded mostly by seeking to limit some of the consequences of that phenomenon, by, for example, ensuring accountability of states for outsourcing. International law has sometimes appeared agnostic, however, about the very legality of privatization. This Article explores a more radical take, namely the possibility that cer…
The United Nations and Human Rights
The very concept of human rights implies governmental accountability. To ensure that governments are held accountable for their treatment of citizens and others, the United Nations has established a wide range of mechanisms to monitor compliance, and to seek to prevent as well as respond to violations. The panoply of implementation measures that the UN has taken since 1945 has resulted in a diverse and complex set of institutional arrangements, t…
The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law
In the past twenty years, international criminal law has become one of the main areas of international legal scholarship and practice. Most textbooks in the field describe the evolution of international criminal tribunals, the elements of the core international crimes, the applicable modes of liability and defences, and the role of states in prosecuting international crimes. This book, however, takes a theoretically informed and refreshingly crit…
Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law
In the past twenty years, international criminal law has become one of the main areas of international legal scholarship and practice. Most textbooks in the field describe the evolution of international criminal tribunals, the elements of the core international crimes, the applicable modes of liability and defences, and the role of states in prosecuting international crimes.0The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law, however, takes a theo…
Homeward Bound? Global Mobility and the Role of the State of Nationality During the Pandemic
The international law of mobility has by and large been focused on the question of immigration. Its emphasis has therefore been on what I will call, for convenience's sake, the host state. It is there that some of the most intense dilemmas around the question of mobility have arisen in a context of populism, xenophobia, and racism. The state of nationality is not invisible in that context, but this has not typically been the primary variable in t…
The Anti-deterrence Hypothesis
Although there is by now considerable debate on how much general deterrence effect international criminal justice has, there has been far less discussion of a discreet dimension that has long been identified in the criminology literature, namely the possibility that criminal justice would have an anti-deterrent effect. Along what lines, then, might we understand international criminal justice to be partly ‘criminogenic’? This article sketches som…
Peering behind the ‘Institutional Veil’ to Assess State Behaviour in the Security Council
A considerable amount of literature exists on whether the Security Council’s actions towards the International Criminal Court ( icc ) as such are broadly consonant with the Rome Statute and the UN Charter. That literature, however, tends to treat the Security Council, and the United Nations with it, as a single bloc, and to judge the legality of its behaviour entirely independently from that of individual Security Council members in the Council. …
The Strange Case of the Victim Who Did Not Want Justice
International Criminal Justice as a Peace Project
Although the Kampala adoption of a regime for the crime of aggression has been generally hailed as a breakthrough, it needs to be understood as part of the long-term evolution of international criminal justice as a peace project. Jus contra bellum considerations have, if anything, dramatically declined in the second half of the 20th century as a central theme in the comprehension of international criminal justice. Compared to an earlier era, star…
Bin Laden
The death of Bin Laden was the highly intentional result not only of US efforts, but also of an international legal regime that could not tolerate what he stood for. What legally justified the execution of Bin Laden for US authorities? International human rights law and international humanitarian law have failed to fully answer this question. Bin Laden was neither “just” a criminal nor merely an adversary in the “war on terror.” Rather, the Al-Qa…
Transnational Mobility, the International Law of Aliens, and the Origins of Global Migration Law
To speak of a “global migration law” is challenging, perhaps even quite provocative, in an era in which walls are being continuously erected at borders and seas transformed into mass graves. The ambition of international law often seems to be to rescue what can still be saved: the refugee regime for example, or minimally decent treatment of migrants once under the jurisdiction of a third country. A global law of migration, then, might be as much …
Theorizing the Laws of War
This chapter suggests two predominant modes of theorizing about the laws of war—one ‘internal’, the other ‘external’—both providing a useful shorthand for two relatively irreducible types of exercises. Internal theorizing makes sense of the discipline among its practitioners and within bounds that are taken for granted. It is minimal in that its ambition is largely instrumental: providing the practitioners of the laws of war with the background n…
Do Facts Exist, Can They Be “Found,” and Does It Matter?
This chapter contrasts two possible views of fact-finding. First, it describes a sort of conventional view of human rights fact-finding, one that relies on a strong notion of facts as existing. It nonetheless suggests a note of skepticism about the diversity of products that fall under the label of “facts,” and some of the fragile premises that seem to underscore the notion. In the second section, the chapter contrasts that conventional view with…
The Anxieties of International Criminal Justice
International criminal justice is on one level a project of hubris and promise, but on another level a project arguably riddled by anxieties. These anxieties are linked to the dizziness of choices available to it, and the degree to which every move to compensate for anxieties produces its own form of anxiety. This article surveys ten distinct anxieties that are deemed to be constitutive of the movement. Ultimately, it argues that the neurotic nat…
What Sort of Global Justice is 'International Criminal Justice
Journal Article What Sort of Global Justice is ‘International Criminal Justice’? Get access Frédéric Mégret Frédéric Mégret * * Associate Professor, Associate Dean of Research (Law) and Canada Research Chair in the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, McGill University, Canada. [[email protected]] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of International Criminal Justice, Volume 13, Issue 1, Mar…
Beyond the ‘Salvation’ Paradigm
The emergence of the idea of a ‘responsibility to protect’ has dominated debates about what should be done to stop atrocities. I argue that, despite notable progress, R2P remains embedded in a vision of ‘international’ rescue as primarily coming from outside, and as such ends up neglecting the very real and often much more decisive role that ‘people’ — individuals, civil society, resistance movements — have had in protecting themselves. I argue f…
War'? Legal Semantics and the Move to Violence
The use of the word 'war' to describe the anti‐terrorist efforts in the wake of the 11 September attacks has gone virtually unchallenged. The term, however, is not innocent and carries far‐reaching implications for international law. The article examines how its use can be said to fit into a broader strategy of legitimization of armed violence. 'War', it is argued, prepares the ground for what is basically an ideal‐typical state of exception, tha…
The International Criminal Court Statute and the Failure to Mention Symbolic Reparation
The International Criminal Court (ICC)'s reparations regime seems very geared towards material reparation such as restitution, compensation and rehabilitation. However, a growing number of international instruments, particularly in the human rights field, anticipate that more symbolic forms of reparation such as satisfaction and non-repetition are mandatory. The article explores what reasons may have led the ICC drafters to not at least mention s…
The Disabilities Convention
Whilst obviously of prime importance for persons with disabilities, the new United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities should also be of utmost interest for the construction and conceptualisation of human rights generally. This article explores the Convention from the point of view of general human rights. Specifically, it argues that because of the irreducibility of persons with disabilities' rights experience, the Con…
The Politics of International Criminal Justice
The Human Rights of Older Persons
The human rights of older persons is an issue that is beginning to garner international attention, partly as a result of the demographic importance of that population. To assess whether calls for a specific human rights approach to older persons are warranted, the article highlights some of the specificities of older persons as a human group. It contextualises the emergence of a relatively strong discourse on the rights of older persons within th…
Fostering Human Rights Accountability
In recent years, the UN has assumed a widening scope of responsibilities and has gradually been transformed from an intergovernmental organization to a global governance mechanism with an ever greater direct impact on individuals. This entails that the UN is also, in principle, capable of violating human rights and occasionally does so in different operational contexts. While this has raised demands for greater UN accountability, Hoffmann and Még…
Epilogue to an Endless Debate
Ever since the adoption of the Rome Statute, the debate over third party jurisdiction triggered by US opposition to the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been raging without any obvious outcome in sight. This article takes a look at one of the latest academic formulations of the evolving US stance which suggests that, to the extent that the ICC will adjudicate what are effectively inter-state matters, it should defer to state sovereignty. Th…
International Shanghai’ (1863–1931)
At the intersection of imperial rule and private power, Shanghai rose to international prominence in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It did so by taking advantage of the extraterritorial status and the dynamic, cosmopolitan population of the International Settlement. In evaluating the fate of the Shanghai Municipal Council, we seek to ascertain how private authority could have been constituted on a trans…
The Anxieties of International Criminal Justice
International criminal justice is on one level a project of hubris and promise, but on another level a project arguably riddled by anxieties. These anxieties are linked to the dizziness of choices available to it, and the degree to which every move to compensate for anxieties produces its own form of anxiety. This article surveys ten distinct anxieties that are deemed to be constitutive of the movement. Ultimately, it argues that the neurotic nat…
Ban on religious symbols in the public service
Bill 21 is a highly contested law adopted in Quebec that bans certain civil servants from wearing religious symbols in the exercise of their duties. Rather than analyse Bill 21 on its merits, the article treats it as a test case for global legal pluralism, examining how the validity of the law from an international perspective depends on the frames one uses to analyse it. It finds that a basic tension permeates the entire debate between a univers…
Are There “Inherently Sovereign Functions” in International Law
Privatization of functions that were traditionally considered sovereign has reached new heights. International lawyers have responded mostly by seeking to limit some of the consequences of that phenomenon, by, for example, ensuring accountability of states for outsourcing. International law has sometimes appeared agnostic, however, about the very legality of privatization. This Article explores a more radical take, namely the possibility that cer…
The Strange Case of the Victim Who Did Not Want Justice
What Sort of Global Justice is 'International Criminal Justice
Journal Article What Sort of Global Justice is ‘International Criminal Justice’? Get access Frédéric Mégret Frédéric Mégret * * Associate Professor, Associate Dean of Research (Law) and Canada Research Chair in the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, McGill University, Canada. [[email protected]] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of International Criminal Justice, Volume 13, Issue 1, Mar…
The regulation of non-international armed conflicts
The Debate section of the Review aims to contribute to reflection on contemporary questions of humanitarian law, policy or action. In this issue of the Review , we invited two experts in international humanitarian law (IHL) – Claus Kreβ and Frédéric Mégret – to debate on how IHL applicable in non-international armed conflict (NIAC) should develop. In the two pieces that follow, Professor Kreβ submits for debate a new norm of international law out…
Justice in Times of Violence
The question of who should judge the terrorists is an intriguing one This article seeks to understand why this is so by putting it into historical perspective. International law has a long history of dealing with terrorism, but was seemingly caught unprepared by the kind of nihilistic destructiveness implied by September 11. The challenge of ‘hyperterrorism’ can be seen as provoking a reorganization of the field. On the one hand, a brief cosmopol…
Epilogue to an Endless Debate
Ever since the adoption of the Rome Statute, the debate over third party jurisdiction triggered by US opposition to the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been raging without any obvious outcome in sight. This article takes a look at one of the latest academic formulations of the evolving US stance which suggests that, to the extent that the ICC will adjudicate what are effectively inter-state matters, it should defer to state sovereignty. Th…
The Politics of International Criminal Justice
War'? Legal Semantics and the Move to Violence
The use of the word 'war' to describe the anti‐terrorist efforts in the wake of the 11 September attacks has gone virtually unchallenged. The term, however, is not innocent and carries far‐reaching implications for international law. The article examines how its use can be said to fit into a broader strategy of legitimization of armed violence. 'War', it is argued, prepares the ground for what is basically an ideal‐typical state of exception, tha…
Justice in Times of Violence
The question of who should judge the terrorists is an intriguing one This article seeks to understand why this is so by putting it into historical perspective. International law has a long history of dealing with terrorism, but was seemingly caught unprepared by the kind of nihilistic destructiveness implied by September 11. The challenge of ‘hyperterrorism’ can be seen as provoking a reorganization of the field. On the one hand, a brief cosmopol…
Prisoners’ Dilemmas
The outbreak of the ‘war against terrorism’ has provoked a deluge of images. It is uncommon for lawyers to think of the impact of the media on the production of law, yet a specific set of images has had a considerable impact on how legal issues surrounding the use of violence have been framed. The article seeks to explore this novel area by focusing on international humanitarian law and how it deals with the recurring question of prisoners. Some …
Fostering Human Rights Accountability
In recent years, the UN has assumed a widening scope of responsibilities and has gradually been transformed from an intergovernmental organization to a global governance mechanism with an ever greater direct impact on individuals. This entails that the UN is also, in principle, capable of violating human rights and occasionally does so in different operational contexts. While this has raised demands for greater UN accountability, Hoffmann and Még…
The Disabilities Convention
Whilst obviously of prime importance for persons with disabilities, the new United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities should also be of utmost interest for the construction and conceptualisation of human rights generally. This article explores the Convention from the point of view of general human rights. Specifically, it argues that because of the irreducibility of persons with disabilities' rights experience, the Con…
A Special Tribunal for Lebanon
Discussions on the creation of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon have focused on its impact on Lebanese sovereignty and, specifically, the fact that a Chapter VII resolution seems to bypass Lebanese democracy. Simply relying on the idea of a ‘breach of international peace and security’ to overcome these arguments is not helpful. It is more useful to locate the creation of the Tribunal within evolving international criminal justice practices. These…
The United Nations and Human Rights
Globalization
Beyond the ‘Salvation’ Paradigm
The emergence of the idea of a ‘responsibility to protect’ has dominated debates about what should be done to stop atrocities. I argue that, despite notable progress, R2P remains embedded in a vision of ‘international’ rescue as primarily coming from outside, and as such ends up neglecting the very real and often much more decisive role that ‘people’ — individuals, civil society, resistance movements — have had in protecting themselves. I argue f…
The International Criminal Court Statute and the Failure to Mention Symbolic Reparation
The International Criminal Court (ICC)'s reparations regime seems very geared towards material reparation such as restitution, compensation and rehabilitation. However, a growing number of international instruments, particularly in the human rights field, anticipate that more symbolic forms of reparation such as satisfaction and non-repetition are mandatory. The article explores what reasons may have led the ICC drafters to not at least mention s…
The Human Rights of Older Persons
The human rights of older persons is an issue that is beginning to garner international attention, partly as a result of the demographic importance of that population. To assess whether calls for a specific human rights approach to older persons are warranted, the article highlights some of the specificities of older persons as a human group. It contextualises the emergence of a relatively strong discourse on the rights of older persons within th…
Holding the Line on Complementarity in Libya
The debate on whether violations of due process should be factored into the International Criminal Court's evaluation of the admissibility of a case has recently been rekindled as a result of the indictment against Saif Gaddafi. This article seizes the opportunity to give the issue a fresh look. It argues that, in addition to the wellknown textual arguments that this is not what complementarity is about, there is a strong and principled policy ca…
The regulation of non-international armed conflicts
The Debate section of the Review aims to contribute to reflection on contemporary questions of humanitarian law, policy or action. In this issue of the Review , we invited two experts in international humanitarian law (IHL) – Claus Kreβ and Frédéric Mégret – to debate on how IHL applicable in non-international armed conflict (NIAC) should develop. In the two pieces that follow, Professor Kreβ submits for debate a new norm of international law out…
The Notion of ‘Continuous Violations’, Expropriated Armenian Properties, and the European Court of Human Rights
This article examines the potential for litigation relating to Armenian properties confiscated following the Armenian Genocide before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). It finds that the ECtHR’s lack of retroactive jurisdiction is a priori an obstacle but that the concept of ‘continuous violation’ may be of assistance, even though expropriation is typically considered an ‘instantaneous violation.’ Nonetheless, the article concludes with …
Global Reasonable Accommodation
This article assesses the potential of the notion of reasonable accommodation as included in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Reasonable accommodation provides a unique case of a domestic concept that has been gradually diffused transnationally, is in the process of being thoroughly internationalised and ought now to be re-domesticated so as to maximise its impact. The record of its domestic implementation so far howe…
What Sort of Global Justice is 'International Criminal Justice
Journal Article What Sort of Global Justice is ‘International Criminal Justice’? Get access Frédéric Mégret Frédéric Mégret * * Associate Professor, Associate Dean of Research (Law) and Canada Research Chair in the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, McGill University, Canada. [[email protected]] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of International Criminal Justice, Volume 13, Issue 1, Mar…
Theorizing the Laws of War
This chapter suggests two predominant modes of theorizing about the laws of war—one ‘internal’, the other ‘external’—both providing a useful shorthand for two relatively irreducible types of exercises. Internal theorizing makes sense of the discipline among its practitioners and within bounds that are taken for granted. It is minimal in that its ambition is largely instrumental: providing the practitioners of the laws of war with the background n…
Do Facts Exist, Can They Be “Found,” and Does It Matter?
This chapter contrasts two possible views of fact-finding. First, it describes a sort of conventional view of human rights fact-finding, one that relies on a strong notion of facts as existing. It nonetheless suggests a note of skepticism about the diversity of products that fall under the label of “facts,” and some of the fragile premises that seem to underscore the notion. In the second section, the chapter contrasts that conventional view with…
The Anxieties of International Criminal Justice
International criminal justice is on one level a project of hubris and promise, but on another level a project arguably riddled by anxieties. These anxieties are linked to the dizziness of choices available to it, and the degree to which every move to compensate for anxieties produces its own form of anxiety. This article surveys ten distinct anxieties that are deemed to be constitutive of the movement. Ultimately, it argues that the neurotic nat…
Transnational Mobility, the International Law of Aliens, and the Origins of Global Migration Law
To speak of a “global migration law” is challenging, perhaps even quite provocative, in an era in which walls are being continuously erected at borders and seas transformed into mass graves. The ambition of international law often seems to be to rescue what can still be saved: the refugee regime for example, or minimally decent treatment of migrants once under the jurisdiction of a third country. A global law of migration, then, might be as much …
The Strange Case of the Victim Who Did Not Want Justice
International Criminal Justice as a Peace Project
Although the Kampala adoption of a regime for the crime of aggression has been generally hailed as a breakthrough, it needs to be understood as part of the long-term evolution of international criminal justice as a peace project. Jus contra bellum considerations have, if anything, dramatically declined in the second half of the 20th century as a central theme in the comprehension of international criminal justice. Compared to an earlier era, star…
Bin Laden
The death of Bin Laden was the highly intentional result not only of US efforts, but also of an international legal regime that could not tolerate what he stood for. What legally justified the execution of Bin Laden for US authorities? International human rights law and international humanitarian law have failed to fully answer this question. Bin Laden was neither “just” a criminal nor merely an adversary in the “war on terror.” Rather, the Al-Qa…
Political science (38 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Law (28 works) · Law (26 works) · International Law and Human Rights (23 works) · International law (20 works) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (19 works) · Politics (16 works) · Human rights (15 works) · Law and economics (13 works)