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Right, Crime, and Court: Toward a Unifying Political Conception of International Law

Zysset, Alain

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Authors

Alain Zysset



Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that human rights law (hereafter, HRL) and international criminal law (hereafter, ICL) share core normative features. Yet, the literature has not yet reconstructed this underlying basis in a systematic way. In this contribution, I lay down the basis of such an account. I first identify a similar tension between a “moral” and a “political” approach to the normative foundations of those norms and to the legitimate role of international courts (hereafter, ICs) and tribunals adjudicating those norms. With a view to bring the debate forward, I then turn to the practices of HRL and international criminal law (hereafter, ICL) to examine which of those approaches best illuminates some salient aspects of the adjudication of ICs. Finally, I argue that the political approach best explains the practice. While each preserves a distinct role, HRL and ICL both establish the basic conditions for the primary subject of international law (HRL and ICL, for the purpose of this article), namely the state, to legitimately govern its own subjects constructed as free and equal moral agents.

Citation

Zysset, A. (2018). Right, Crime, and Court: Toward a Unifying Political Conception of International Law. Criminal Law and Philosophy, 12(4), 677-693. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-017-9450-9

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 10, 2017
Online Publication Date Nov 16, 2017
Publication Date Dec 1, 2018
Deposit Date Nov 1, 2017
Publicly Available Date Oct 22, 2018
Journal Criminal Law and Philosophy
Print ISSN 1871-9791
Electronic ISSN 1871-9805
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 12
Issue 4
Pages 677-693
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-017-9450-9

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.





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