Gregory Gordon, Atrocity Speech Law

Atrocity speech is a largely unsettled area of international criminal law, situated in a field of tension between criminalizing acts resulting from inflammatory speech on the one hand and the protection of freedom of expression on the other. Recent developments involving increased nationalism and populism have certainly helped to capture scholarly attention on hate crimes. As such, the publication of Gregory Gordon’s Atrocity Speech Law by Oxford University Press and the coinciding publication of Incitement on Trial by Richard Ashby Wilson by Cambridge University Press are timely products, reflecting the current academic interest in speech that is set in a context of armed conflicts, widespread or systematic attacks or genocide. Interestingly, both scholars arrive at a similar conclusion: Ashby Wilson suggests handling inciting speech under the preventive doctrine of inchoate crimes and completed crimes under ordering and complicity as forms of liability. Gordon, for his part, advocates the creation of a Unified Liability Theory that includes four general categories of speech offences: incitement, speech-abetting, instigation and ordering. This theory should, in the view of Gordon, be operationalized through the promulgation of a new treaty and/or an amendment of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Complicity · Crimes against humanity · Criminal law · Criminology · Incitement · International law · Political science · Sociology · War crime · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Law