Criminalizing atrocity

International law ties the hands of states and their leaders. Human rights-based scholarship has wrestled with the contradiction inherent in the agreement of violating states to treaties that limit their ability to control their people (see e.g. the work of Oona A. Hathaway, Erik Voeten, etc.). Berlin refocuses the question by asking why states criminalize atrocity crimes when leaders have little to gain by doing so and legal actors such as the International Criminal Court specifically aim to hold heads of state accountable. This important book argues that there are two main ways to explain the domestic introduction of atrocity laws. The first is what Berlin refers to as a ‘rational expression’—where democratic states introduce the law because they are already in, or can easily bring themselves into, compliance with it. The second is the one that underlies most of the book—here, legal experts influence the introduction of atrocity law

Contradiction · Criminal law · Democracy · Human rights · International law · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Law