Yvonne McDermott, Fairness in International Criminal Trials

Fairness is the benchmark against which any criminal trial is measured. Trials before international criminal courts are no exception. While academics and practitioners readily employ the term ‘lack of fairness’ to describe international criminal trials, the concrete meaning of this term is far from apparent. Yvonne McDermott’s Fairness in International Criminal Trials expounds, in a concrete and thorough manner, on the content of the standard of fairness that the international criminal trials ought to espouse. The book starts with identifying the concept of fair trial as a unique and concrete expression of the notion of fairness.1 Fair trial for these purposes includes a certain number of minimum procedural guarantees accompanied by such principles common to various theories of fairness as consistency, publicity, non-retroactivity, equality before the law and legal certainty.2 The individual procedural guarantees that constitute the right to a fair trial are enshrined in the statutes of international criminal tribunals, including, inter alia, the presumption of innocence, the right to trial by an independent and impartial tribunal and without undue delay, the right to be informed of the charges, to present and examine evidence, the rights to an interpreter, representation and to a public trial

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