Langer: Participation and Accountability to the International Community as Legitimacy Requirements of Universal Jurisdiction: Illustrations from the German Code

Maximo Langer (Univ. of California, Los Angeles - Law) has posted Participation and Accountability to the International Community as Legitimacy Requirements of Universal Jurisdiction: Illustrations from the German Code. Here's the abstract:

Questions on the legitimacy of the exercise of universal jurisdiction by states over crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes have generated great attention among policy-makers and scholars. This article argues that allowing participation and being accountable to the international community are two legitimacy requirements that universal jurisdiction statutes and proceedings should strive to meet. The article shows that these principles of participation and accountability to the international community are legitimacy requirements of universal jurisdiction regardless of which conception of international law and international institutions one adopts — statist, cosmopolitan democracy, natural law, global administrative law, or global constitutionalism. The article then analyzes how these principles of participation and accountability have important implications for many of the central debates on universal jurisdiction statutes and proceedings such as which crimes they may include, how these crimes should be defined, which doctrines of the general part of international criminal law they should incorporate, how universal jurisdiction cases should be selected, what the relationship between universal jurisdiction prosecutions and the ICC should be, and how individual universal jurisdiction proceedings could give participation to the international community. The article takes the German Code of Crimes against International Law (VStGB) as a case study to illustrate its analysis.