TITLE:
Group-Based Imputation and the International Criminal Law Discourse. Individuals and Associations as International Criminal Wrongdoers
AUTHORS:
Charis Papacharalambous
KEYWORDS:
International Criminal Law; Collective Guilt; Collective Agents; Co-Perpetration
JOURNAL NAME:
Beijing Law Review,
Vol.4 No.4,
December
11,
2013
ABSTRACT: Collective agency is resurfacing within
International Criminal Law (ICL) discourse; its genealogical traces can be
found in socio-legal contexts like in systemic theories of liability, victimization-centered
approaches and criminal policy models transforming traditional criminal law
provisions into “combat norms”. At
the intersection between moral theories and law discourse, one can also trace
as similar traits the discussions on the relations between corporations’ and
purely collective patterns of imputation, whereby selflessness is the main
normative characteristic of the wrongdoer. At the level of criminal law,
theorizing collective guilt can be made thematic through the methodological turn
towards collectivism, the promotion of an aggregate knowledge model as
appropriate liability form and the normative orientation towards the criterion
of concerted action as individually imputable collective wrong. The qualified
forms of co-perpetration within ICL discourse (like the “Joint Criminal Enterprise”, the “Organized Structures of Power” or the “Joint Control of Crime”) are then considered as slippery and
ethnocentric hermeneutic tools for translating collective imputation into legal
linguistics. Thereby recent developments in the jurisdiction of the
International Criminal Court as well as in this of the newer internationalized
courts are accordingly analyzed.