Critique internationale - Content
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[So Far, So Near: The Legitimacy of Investigation in Universal Jurisdiction Cases]
When an examining magistrate has to investigate crimes committed abroad, not only is the margin for maneuver slimmer than in investigations on the national territory, but also the very legitimacy of the procedure is challenged by the defense, which seeks to prove that the court is invalid. How can examining magistrates recover their freedom of action? Should they rely on evidence supplied by NGOs, which often enjoy more extensive means than they? On the basis of two case studies in universal jurisdiction, the Habré case and the “Butare four” case, the author considers how the logistic support offered by NGOs influences the credibility of an international investigation.
[Extreme Crises and the Institutionalization of International Criminal Law]
The end of the Cold War has brought an increased legalization of the international sphere, particularly through the field of international criminal law. We examine how law has enjoyed this dominance through an institutional biography of the International Criminal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). We find that through its own survival strategies, the Tribunal’s trajectory generated symbolic and material capital that is securing a broader institutionalization of international criminal law. We demonstrate how innovations within the ICTY produced new resources and legal tools, and formed a professional class of international civil servants who are going on to legitimate and extend these tools in other venues. As a result, the field is gaining a foothold despite a recent loss in momentum of the ICTY itself. Consonant with the broader valuation of symbolic goods, we conclude that the legalization of the international works through a logic of deferred accomplishments, in which short-term losses are part of a gamble for securing institutional longevity. As a result, efforts to have law dominate the international may be winning even when they appear to lose
[Managing an Armed Conflict like a Court Case: The Example of Amnesty International in the Ivory Coast]
This article aims to pry open the “black box” of a public activist stance, analyzing Amnesty International’s discourse on the ongoing Ivory Coast crisis since September 2002, drawing on participatory observation conducted in the Paris research offices of the organization’s international secretariat. Tackling the question from the angle of law, analysis of the discursive strategies used by this organization as well as the broader context in which the producers of this discourse are involved reveals gradual pragmatic arrangements having to do with the building of expertise within the organization. This pragmatism appears not only in the strategies the organization has developed to adapt to the new situation of a postbipolar context, in particular the “urgency” of armed conflicts, but also in the changing rules of impartiality on which its moral authority is based.
[From Civic Suspicion to Civil Investigation: Controversies over France’s Policy in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994]
Since the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis perpetrated in 1994, current affairs journalists have conducted a campaign to denounce France’s diplomatic and military interventions in Rwanda carried out between October 1990 and August 1994. These authors and their publishers have set out to reveal the secret and criminal dealings attributed to senior civilian and military officials. In the 1994 to 2004 period studied, these accusations have convinced mainly the small circle of activists already involved in unveiling political intrigues. In 2004, year in which the tenth anniversary of the genocide was commemorated, a “Civil Investigation Commission on France’s Role in Rwanda during the Genocide of Rwanda Tutsis in 1994” was organized by journalists in conjunction with legal experts. According to the conclusions of the report issued by the Commission, France not only facilitated but devised the plan to exterminate the Tutsis. The article studies the investigative models used by the Commission and their coherence, deemed sufficient to implicate France in the genocide.
[A Gulag during the Gulag Period? The Kravchenko Case (1949)]
The Kravchenko case today can be seen as an essential phase in the denunciation of Soviet regime crimes. This article reviews the details of the 1949 trial that opposed Kravchenko, a Ukrainian renegade, and the Communist weekly Les Lettres françaises that had launched a vilification campaign against him. The legal specificities of the charge of slander as well as the framework of a Paris criminal court in 1949 imposed particular constraints on the adversaries, whose respective goals – far over and above slander – was a denunciation of Soviet crimes and a condemnation of anti-Sovietism. Lawyers played a decisive role in the interweaving of arguments capable of supporting these opposing viewpoints at the height of the Cold War. This trial, of which the political and ideological stakes were instantly clear to the protagonists of the time, is an atypical and fascinating example of the complex relations that can be woven between justice and severe crises.
[The United States: Understanding the Theocratic-Secular Enigma]
It is deeply misleading to consider the United States as a democratic regime under the supervision of Christian guidelines, for it is indeed a secular state the principles of which are clearly set out in the First Amendment to the Constitution. In fact, since the colonial period, two antagonistic rationales have constantly meshed: a spirit of religion aiming to place all aspects of life under the auspices of divine law, and a spirit of secularity regularly consolidated by Supreme Court jurisprudential progress. Seven major periods can be identified, each marked by the dominance of one tendency or the other. If at times the theocratic position has won out, it has always been thwarted by the reactivation of the secular perspective. The history of this ebb and glow teaches us that the current fundamentalist revival fits in line with a secular tradition. It also prompts us to seek the balancing element that has enabled this paradoxical combination to remain coherent. Civil religion provides a key to this enigma. It refers to three principles: respect for God, considered to preside over the country’s destiny, the conviction that the republican model offers an example for all of humanity and the desire to defend its underlying values. This is how, beyond the potentially conflictual dimension of the theocratic-separatist mix, civil religion has made the theocratic aspiration of radical Protestants compatible with the separatist will of the partisans of a secular state.
[Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao in India: Perspectives on a Decade of Chinese-Indian Relations (1996 - 2006)]
During his November 20-23, 2006 visit to India, President Hu Jintao undoubtedly meant to mark a new stage in the building of Chinese-Indian relations, held up as decisive for the world order. By the same token he complete a time cycle commenced ten years earlier by his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, the first PRC head of state to have made an official visit to neighboring India. It is the evolution of the relations between India and China that is analyzed in this article. A close look at the decade that elapsed between the two presidents’ respective visits inspires three rather provocative questions, or ones that in any event denote a certain skepticism, as much as regards what has changed as what has remained the same. Where does the border question stand today? For, despite efforts made since 1996, the two neighbors remain basically incapable of settling a territorial dispute that bears the stigma of the flare-up in 1962. What view should be taken of the Economic Partnership in the first decade of the 21st century, hailed as beneficial, whereas it causes a certain degree of friction? And what is the meaning of China’s recent backdown as regards possible civilian nuclear cooperation with India, which does nothing to resolve the issue of military nuclear arsenals, nevertheless at the crux of the balance between China and India
[“Civil War” Dynamics in Palestine]
Out of convenience or bias, the major international media have consistently tied the multiplication of inter-Palestinian clashes in late 2006 and early 2007 to the Hamas victory in the January 2006 legislative elections. Yet the outbreak of partisan violence was not spawned by this victory. For the past several years, corruption(fasâd), anarchy (fawda) and lawlessness(falatân) have been fueling a dynamics the outcome of which, a “civil war”(fitna), was known, feared and condemned by the population. For the voters, Fath is believed at best to have failed to combat these various ills; at worst it is allegedly behind them. Given its reputation for probity and effectiveness, the people’s trust was invested in Hamas to undertake the mission of overcoming the “civil war” logic. But by impeding Hamas from carrying out its mandate, President Mahmoud Abbas, Fath, Israel and the international community have contributed, each in its own capacity, to transforming the lack of law and order into a “civil war” of which the premises were manifest as early as summer 2006. After having analyzed the various constitutive elements of this dynamics and their interconnections, this study resituates the process underway in the recent history of the Palestinian national movement.
Vers un nouveau désordre mondial : politique comparée et anthropologie pluraliste selon Clifford Geertz
Robert C. Lieberman, Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005, XVIII – 312 pages.
Joan W. Scott, Parité ! L’universel et la différence des sexes, Paris, Albin Michel, 2005, 254 pages.
Nicolas Bauquet, François Bocholier (dir.), Le communisme et les élites en Europe centrale, Paris, PUF/Éditions ENS rue d'Ulm, 2006, 378 pages
