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Conference Announcement Theme: Common Civility Subtitle: International Criminal Law as a Cultural Hybrid Type: International Conference Institution: TMC Asser Institute Location: The Hague (Netherlands) Date: 28.-29.1.2011 __________________________________________________ On 28 and 29 January, the TMC Asser Institute will host a conference on “Common Civility: International Criminal Law as a Cultural Hybrid.” Below is an overview of the program and links to the conference flyer and brochure. The object of the conference on Common Civility is to contribute to further development of International Criminal Law (ICL) by the exchange of thoughts between legal scholars, practitioners and social scientists. It focuses on the crucial point all kinds of international and internationalised tribunals have in common: Their effectiveness and thus their ability to carry out their task, i.e. to end impunity for the worst crimes known to humanity, depend to a great extend on the functionality of their procedural law. This finding led to an increasing debate on how to guarantee a fair and efficient trial by safeguarding the observance of the rights of the accused and other participants through an operational criminal procedure. The recent discussion is still dominated by the adversarial (common law) – inquisitorial (civil law) dichotomy. Sometimes this clash of legal systems seems to have become an end in itself, resulting in a debate on which system is superior. At least in theory, however, modern international criminal procedural law seems to have overcome the adversarial-inquisitorial dichotomy since it combines features of both common and civil law systems. This unique compromise structure poses a challenge to the practitioners who – although trained in and influenced by their respective national systems – have to apply the procedural norms at the international level and in doing so to find an appropriate balance between adversarial and inquisitorial features. This is even more challenging since the single elements of the different legal traditions do not fit together seamlessly, leading to myriad, heated disagreements over how to combine them into a single, coherent, workable legal system. The main objective of the conference is to explore the background and consequences of the civil-common law conflict, to disclose how it affects the daily functioning of international tribunals, which tensions arise from the combination of features from the different legal systems and to discuss how they might best be resolved. Thus, the speakers and participants will have to deal with the following questions on international criminal (procedural) law such as: 1. What have been the respective contributions of civil law versus common law (and attorneys from each legal culture) to the recent development of international criminal law? 2. Why have international criminal courts and drafters of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court chosen to adopt common law approaches to certain issues but civil law ones on other matters? 3. Why did the current competition over whose law would be incorporated into ICL come to be so widely understood as one between common and civil lawyers, rather than say North versus South (as would surely have occurred in the 1960s and 70s), French versus German, formal versus customary, or any number of other possible axes of contention? 4. How do lawyers initially trained in one legal culture respond to the challenges of workplace environments at international and hybrid tribunals, where they must collaborate professionally with lawyers trained in the other legal culture? How have such encounters – with their attendant miscommunications and sometimes- heated disagreements – shaped the intellectual development of this burgeoning new field? 5. What are the implications for coherence and workability of the resulting cultural hybrid that the field is thereby coming to embody? Within each legal culture, after all, the effect of a given legal rule is often limited by another rule. These topics cannot be discussed adequately from a purely legal point of view. Accordingly, the conference is based on a multi-disciplinary approach of the disciplines of international criminal law, public international law, legal anthropology and sociology of law. The speakers and participants consist of legal scholars, judges, and social scientists from various European Countries and the United States. Moreover, in order to guarantee at truly ‘universal’ cross-cultural exchange of thoughts the organizer will also invite experts from legal traditions which have been neglected in the discussion so far, e.g. representatives of Islamic countries. Another objective and interest of the conference is to start the building of a continuing international network for interchange between the participants to explore a particularly salient and recurrent conflict in the recent development of international criminal law. This innovative initiative could strengthen both national and international research on a highly relevant international societal issue of cross cultural exchange and interactions. The Conference will be hosted by the T.M.C. Asser Instituut, a leading scientific research institute in the field of International Law. The Hague as the seat of the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the ICC has become the legal capital of the world and is therefore the perfect venue for such a multi-disciplinary conference on ICL. The conference is co-organized by the Amsterdam Centre of Inter-disciplinary Research on International Crimes (ACIC) at VU University and the Institut für Kriminalwissenschaften of Göttingen University. The conference fee: € 95,- For more information and registration please send an e-mail to: [email protected] (Subject: Common Civility Conference) Flyer: http://www.asser.nl/upload/documents/11172010_52640Conference%20Invitation.pdf Program: http://www.asser.nl/upload/documents/11252010_111342Programme%20Common%20Civility%20Conference%202011.pdf __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
