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i
ADVOCATES OF HUMANITY
ii
Advocates
of Humanity
Human Rights NGOs in
International Criminal Justice
KJERSTI LOHNE
1
iv
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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© Kjersti Lohne 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
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a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
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v
Acknowledgements
viii Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations
AI Amnesty International
ARLPI Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative
ASP Assembly of States Parties
AU African Union
CAR Central African Republic
CEPEJ European Commission for the Efficiency of
Justice
CICC Coalition for the International Criminal Court
DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo
ECOSOC United Nations Economic and Social Council
FIDH International Federation for Human Rights
HRW Human Rights Watch
HURINET-U Human Rights Network—Uganda
IBA International Bar Association
ICC International Criminal Court
ICJ International Criminal Justice
ICL International Criminal Law
ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross
ICTR International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
ICTY International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia
LRA Lord’s Resistance Army
MENA Middle Eastern and North African
MICT UN Mechanism for International Criminal
Tribunals
NGO Non-governmental organisation
NPWJ No Peace Without Justice
NRC Norwegian Refugee Council
OPCW Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons
OSJI Open Society Justice Initiative
OTP Office of The Prosecutor
PGA Parliamentarians for Global Action
PSVI Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative
SC Security Council
xvi
1
Locating International
Criminal Justice
Connections, Forces, Imaginations
1
http://www.coalitionfortheicc.org/about-coalition-0 (accessed 11 April 2018).
its founding Rome Statute.2 Today, 123 states are members of the
Court, and with that have given up some of their monopoly of the
use of force. Criminal punishment has ‘gone global’.
This book is about this development, and more specifically
about the signification of the relationship between a purported
‘global civil society’ with global criminal justice-making. What
does it mean when it is said that the ICC is a ‘global civil society
achievement’ (e.g. Glasius, 2006)—who are these actors, how do
they imagine global justice through the ICC, and what do these
connections imply for the meaning and social functions of punish-
ment at the global level of analysis? To this end, the book offers an
analysis of transnational networks in their mobilization for global
justice through the ICC.
NGOs fulfil a number of functions in international criminal
justice that, arguably, would be inconceivable at the national level
of criminal justice (see Tomczak, 2016). In addition to their ‘trad-
itional’ roles of advocacy and agenda-setting, NGOs identify and
represent victims to the Court; they provide evidence and amicus
curia briefs; do ‘outreach’ vis-à-vis affected communities; lobby
states for financial and political support of the Court; and draft
penal codes and promote their implementation in domestic sys-
tems of criminal justice—to give but a few examples. Yet more
than just functioning as ‘judicial institution builders’ (Haddad,
2012), NGOs are presumed to provide the field of international
criminal justice with moral authority (Dixon and Tenove, 2013).
By speaking on behalf of victims ‘everywhere’, human rights
NGOs produce moral outrage at distant suffering while asserting
cosmopolitan notions of solidarity and justice in an ultimately
state-centric international order. As such, their embrace of inter-
national criminal justice is considered part of the advance towards
a more ‘people-empowering’ international rule of law (Glasius,
2002)—a global criminal order created by and for ‘humanity’ ra-
ther than the interests of nation states.
To discern the social organization of this connection, I have ap-
proached the transnational networks of NGOs advocating for the
ICC as an ethnographic object, albeit a messy and multi-sited one.
A central objective is to explore how connections are made, and
how forces and imaginations of global (criminal) justice travel.
2
Since 17 July 2018, the ICC also has jurisdiction over states that have ratified
the amendment to the Rome Statute on the crime of aggression (see Kreß, 2018).
3
How do NGOs ‘connect’ for justice, and what are the aspects of
global social organization that enable these linkages and ruptures?
Ideas of global (criminal) justice travel with and across people, or-
ganizations, and the internet. Likewise, the work of international
criminal justice is multi-sited. Conflict and mass violence in one
part of the world are transported into the courtrooms in another;
here they are rendered intelligible through law and legal experts
who, with reason and logic, search for justice in the form of in-
dividual accountability. This trajectory of global justice-making
is imagined to come full circle once the deliberations are over,
when blame has been attributed, and ‘justice’ is dispersed back
to the site of conflict and mass violence. The multi-sited materi-
ality of the ICC, and of the field of international criminal justice
generally, is thus symptomatic of the ‘unbundling’ of the local
as a container of the social (Sassen, 2007). ‘Traditional’ ethno-
graphic approaches that equate social phenomena with limited
and bounded localities no longer suffice (Burawoy, 2000; Anders,
2007; Faubion and Marcus, 2009).
While research has spanned the nations of Belgium, the
Netherlands, Norway, Rwanda, Uganda, and the UK, The
Hague— as the centre of global justice- making— has been
the primary perspective in research and analysis. There, multiple
locations make up analytical sites; from the ICC and other courts
in the city, the ICC Assembly of States Parties (ASP) diplomatic
meetings in the World Forum, NGO headquarters and satellite
offices, to the plethora of research institutes and informal sites of
restaurants, pubs, and cafés around the city. The description of the
CICC and The Hague Municipality’s reception demonstrates the
potential of such an approach. To further reflect the field’s (dis)
connections, I traced the network structure of the CICC, focusing
on their Secretariat in The Hague; their core group of Steering
Committee NGO members—most of whom had permanent rep-
resentation in The Hague (or Brussels or London); and one case of
centre-periphery relations, tracing its regional networks to Africa,
its national networks to Uganda, and finally to its local network
in Gulu in northern Uganda—one of the sites of mass violence
that is the object of global justice-making at the ICC. Analytically,
this approach involved a shift from an ethnographic focus on ‘site’
to the study of international criminal justice as ‘field’, meaning the
relation between sites enables insights into the connections and
disconnections of the whole (Burawoy, 2001).
4
Research Aims
The research for this book had already begun during my post-
graduate work on the ICC’s intervention in northern Uganda,
a region tormented by a protracted violent conflict between the
Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)—
with the civilian Acholi population in the midst of it. As peace talks
between the Ugandan government and the LRA were progressing,
the ICC issued arrest warrants for five of the top commanders of
the LRA. However, the ICC indictments turned out to be a major
obstacle to achieving peace and security in the region, as the LRA
refused to lay down arms and continue peace negotiations with
the threat of arrests hanging over their heads. The situation in
northern Uganda thus came to be, in the words of a contemporary
observer, ‘something of a battleground between those who have
been promoting the immediate application of mechanisms of re-
tributive justice, and those who feel that this particular way of
pursuing justice substantially jeopardises the prospects of peace’
(Okello, 2007: 1). When I explored the different conceptualiza-
tions of justice that characterized this ‘battleground’, the role of
international human rights NGOs as carriers of discourses on
justice emerged as a principal finding—and one that suggested
further research. International human rights NGOs represented
and promoted specific modes of thinking about justice and pun-
ishment, and a core objective of this research has been to unpack
what these mentalities and sensibilities consist of. Questions of
values and meanings attributed to international criminal justice
has thus guided this research, particularly as regards its role as
an expression of ‘the international’ will to punish. To whom is it
meaningful, and why?
To this end, the central aim of this book is to explore how the
role of international human rights NGOs in international crim-
inal justice yields empirical insight into the meaning of punish-
ment at the global level of analysis. This overarching objective
has been guided by way of three separate yet interrelated sets of
analytic questions:
1. What are the roles of NGOs in international criminal justice?
2. What characterizes punishment ‘gone global’?
3. How is international criminal justice constituted by and of ‘the
global’?
5
Research Aims 5
Research Aims 7
3
See https://www.irmct.org/en (accessed 4 August 2019).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
the tax, but also business profits on the tax. On the other hand, taxes
upon Rent tend to check the Economic evil of speculation in
Landownership and the consequent monopolization of Natural
Resources unproductively.
Related to the problems thus suggested is the policy commonly
and widely known as “the Single Tax,” the fiscal method proposed
and widely popularized by Henry George for initiating and promoting
an evolutionary process in the direction not only of ethical
readjustments of fiscal methods but also of ethical readjustments of
the Economic relations of mankind to Natural Resources and to
Artificial Objects produced from and upon Natural Resources in
accordance with natural Economic law.
That policy rests upon three Economic principles. One is the
principle that Land (Natural Resources) is not an individual
inheritance but is a common inheritance. Since no man or body of
men ever has or ever can create Land, it is by edict of natural
Economic law the inheritance of all that are living. But inasmuch as
Land cannot be well utilized (such Natural Resources as the sea and
other open waters excepted) unless subjected to private possession
for farming, mining, manufacturing, merchandising and homes, or
the like, private possession, control and management of areas of
Land are an Economic necessity. To adapt that practical necessity,
therefore, to the common right, the Single Tax policy proposes to
make private possession secure without prejudice to common
ownership, by the assignment annually, through taxation, of the
annual Economic Rent or Value of all Natural Resources to
Governmental treasuries by way of annual compensation to the
community for the annual values which the community gives to that
Land. Concurrently the Single Tax policy would exempt Artificial
Products and their producers from all taxation, on the principle that
Artificial Products (Wealth) are the private property of their producers
and purchasers.
The contention of “Single Taxers” is that such a policy would
place Taxation upon a sound and ethical basis; that it would secure
to utilizers of particular Natural Resources the full value of their use;
that it would properly take from them for the benefit of all, the value
of their monopoly of possession of common property; that it would
stabilize the value of monopolized but unused Natural Resources
(Land) at the level of their value for use, thereby abolishing
speculation in the future values of Natural Resources; that it would
open opportunities for Labor in its broadest and fullest sense to
utilize Natural Resources in the production of Wealth (Artificial
Objects) from Land (Natural Resources); that it would remove the
artificial and lessen the natural barriers to Trade; and that it would
bring about conditions of industrial freedom and equality on the basis
of which every other needed social or Economic reform could rest
securely and function effectively.
As the practical approach to that fundamental Economic reform
—that reform of which its principal and distinguished advocate,
Henry George, said that it would not accomplish everything in the
way of Economic adjustment, but that without it nothing could be
accomplished, for without it every Economic improvement instead of
raising Wages raises Rent, instead of increasing the compensation
of producers of Artificial Objects increases the values of the Natural
Resources from which alone Artificial Objects can be produced and
on which alone they can be traded, used or enjoyed—as the
practical approach to that fundamental Economic reform the Single
Tax policy proposes its application gradually. It aims to substitute by
stages the Taxation of Land according to its value as a commodity,
for the present unrighteous and obstructive taxation of the actual
6
uses of Land.
6
See “Progress and Poverty,” “Protection or Free Trade,”
and “Social Problems,” by Henry George, and “What Is the
Single Tax?” by Louis F. Post.
7
“Principles of Political Economy.” Chapter II.
Still better agricultural Land would extract still higher Rent out of
the Wealth product for the like special privilege of Production. Thus,
with alterations in the so-called Margin of Production, the natural
allocations from Wealth to Wages would rise or fall as the Margin
receded or advanced, whereas the natural allocations from Wealth to
Rent would rise with the advances of the Margin and fall with its
recession.
The same marginal principle applies to other kinds of Land
precisely as it does to the agricultural, some advanced Economic
students to the contrary notwithstanding. For a non-agricultural
illustration, here are two mineral deposits. One is more easily worked
than the other, or more conveniently situated with reference to
demand for the mineral product for Consumption. It is therefore more
attractive to Labor than the other. Consequently, Labor will naturally
yield to the ownership of the superior deposit (Land) a larger
proportion of the mineral it extracts (Wealth) than to the ownership of
the inferior deposit. The proportionate excess is Rent.
For still another illustration of the same Rent principle, here are
two building-sites in a town or city. They are of equal size, and in
every other physical respect equally desirable. But one of them is at
the center of the business or other social activities of the town or city,
the other at the outskirts. The former being in the Economic sense
more desirable for Labor purposes than the latter, Labor yields to its
ownership a larger proportion of Wealth as Rent than to the
ownership of the other.
In a vast variety of special instances, such as those used above
for illustrative purposes, Rent exacts from the flow of Wealth a
continuous allocation which depends for its proportions to the
aggregate flow upon the desirability of different qualities and
locations of Land (as the Natural Resource factor in the production of
Wealth) relatively to the desirability of such qualities and locations as
may be had for the taking.
“The rent for any piece of land,” writes Max Hirsch, the
8
Australian economist, “is determined by the excess of its
productivity over that of an equal area of the least desirable land in
use, after the sum of exertions which in both cases yield the most
profitable result has been deducted.”
8
Page 127 of “Democracy vs. Socialism.”
III. Trade
The Distribution of Wealth, as well as its Production, is effected
through Trade. As in the Productive Process from the very beginning
of Labor specialization up to the point of delivery to ultimate
consumers, so in the process of Distribution, Trade is the continuous
and the culminating agency. It determines the kind of Wealth and the
quantity that each factor in Production shall receive.
We have seen that Labor as a whole, a social unit, produces
Wealth from Land and that this activity and this result are governed
by natural Economic law—by natural relations of Economic effect to
Economic cause. We have seen also that a correlative natural law, a
correlative connection of effect to cause, constantly allocates one
portion of the total Product to the Labor factor and another portion to
the Land factor. We may readily see, moreover, that those two
primary allocations subdivide into almost infinitesimal and extremely
confusing secondary categories, comprising every variety of Labor,
every variety of Land, every variety of Wealth, every variety of
Economic desire. It is to satisfy those desires out of that continuous
flow of Wealth that the infinitude of processes indicated in the next
preceding Lesson enter into the comprehensive Productive Process
which includes delivery to ultimate consumers, and that an infinitude
of corresponding processes enter into Distribution.
Many of those processes overlap, playing now a part in
Production and now in Distribution. Some of them are natural, some
are customary, some are legalistic. But all are subject to the
cooperation or to the obstruction of natural law as manifestly as is
the navigation of a sailing vessel on the ocean. In so far as the
customary or the legalistic do not conform to natural Economic law,
natural penalizations inevitably result; in so far as they do conform to
natural Economic law, the results are socially as well as individually
beneficial. As with gravitation in the physical universe, so with its
correspondent force in the Economic domain.
Not only, then, are the minute details of Labor specialization
merged in Productive wholes and delivered in their completeness to
ultimate consumers by means of Trade, as we learned in the next
preceding Lesson, but, also by means of Trade, the two great
divisions of Wealth (Wages and Rent) are assigned respectively to
Labor interests and to Land interests in proportions determined by
comparisons of Value.
Individual deliveries, in contrast with Distribution into the two
basic categories, Wages and Rent, consist in the delivery of Wealth
to individuals in proportion to the effective demands of each. Their
demands are limitless, for when satisfied with quantity they naturally
demand quality. But there is a limit to all effective demands. The
limitation on the one hand is the producer’s ability to produce, and
on the other the consumer’s ability to obtain in Trade. Ability to
produce depends in high degree at any time upon the general
productive knowledge of the time. Ability to obtain depends upon the
Economic power in Trade of the individual seeking to gratify his
wants. If he is isolated from all the rest of mankind, he is outside the
Economic circle and can obtain only what he himself directly
produces. If he is one of an absolutely free community, he can obtain
what others are willing to give him in Trade for the service he renders
directly or indirectly to them. If Production be arbitrarily obstructed,
whether by impediments to Natural Resources or to Trade, his ability
to obtain Wealth is not so much according to what he produces or to
the service of any other kind that he renders, but according to his
command over the sources of Production and the channels of Trade
whereby he may levy tribute or escape it.
As human services naturally tend to exchange at par for equally
desirable human services, so do different forms of Wealth, each
product of human service, tend to exchange at par for equally
desirable forms of Wealth; and as Wealth in the Rent category and
Wealth in the Wages category are alike service-products of Labor
applied to Land, exchanges of every kind of Wealth tend to be
effected on the basis of equality in the expenditure of Labor for their
Production.
Let it now be carefully observed and faithfully remembered in
this connection, that however various the kind and the amount of
Wealth that individuals receive, each variety is but a subdivision of
Wealth as a whole, and is therefore either Wages or Rent, those
being the two primary divisions of Wealth in Distribution. A “captain
of industry” may get a large share of Wealth for his service while a
skilled laborer gets a small share for his; but each will take his share
from Wages, not from Rent. On the other hand, the owner of a rich
mining opportunity may get a large share of Wealth and the owner of
a small area of farming land or a village building-lot may get a small
share; but each will in that respect get Rent, not Wages. To the
extent, however, that the “captain of industry” derives any part of his
income from Natural-Resource privileges, that part is Rent; and to
the extent that the mine owner or the farm owner or the village lot
owner derives any part of his from his service, that part is Wages.
Thus the factor in Production technically termed Land is
represented in Distribution by the Wealth element technically termed
Rent; whereas the factor in Production technically termed Labor is
represented in Distribution by the Wealth element technically termed
Wages.
IV. Money
All allocations of Wealth, from the two primary ones—Wages and
Rent—to the least of all that are secondary to either of those two, are
made through Trade, and in the course of Trade are measured by
comparisons of Value, which is the universal regulator of Trade. And
as in Production so in Distribution, for Value measurements Money is
the more or less stable yardstick and Money terms the spokesmen.
Would we know the Value of Wealth in any of its distributive
allotments, we must look for it in terms of Money. Would we know the
Value of any of the various kinds and degrees of Labor that have
produced it, Money terms offer us the only language we can use or
understand. Would we know the Value of any of the various kinds
and degrees of Land from which and upon which such Wealth has
been produced by Labor—whether identified by the term Rent as in
Economics or by such colloquial or business terms as “groundrent,”
or “selling price,”—Money is our sole interpreter, defective though it
be. Would we place any or all of this information on record, we must
do so in terms of Money.
What, then, is Money—this prestidigitateur of both Production
and Distribution? Is it coin? Is it a promise to pay? Is it a fiat of
Value? Is it a magic signal?
Before considering whether or not it is coin, let us think of how
slightly coin is used in Trade. Before suggesting promises to pay, let
us reflect upon the variability and questionability of promises. Before
falling back upon “fiat,” let us know somewhat of the wisdom and
responsibility behind the “fiat.”
If we probe deep, as in these Lessons we have tried to do, shall
we not find that the only level of Value is the Labor level?
Not Labor time. That varies in Value with individuals. But Labor
service or product. And do not the market prices of stable Labor
products come as near to the Value level as may be necessary for all
the purposes of Trade relations?
An absolute level of Value is doubtless as far beyond the
possibilities as an absolute sea level. But as we adopt a “mean level”
of the sea, why not a “mean level” of Value? And why not express
the relations of this level in terms of Money properly stabilized?
The most conspicuous method yet suggested for realizing such
a Value level takes the specific form of a proposal to determine
Money standards by frequent comparisons with the Price level of
simple types of Wealth. Resting nominally upon the Value in Trade of
such staples, this method rests fundamentally upon the Economic
fact that Labor, as the continuous producer of all Wealth, is the real
source and regulator at all times of all Values in the channels of
Trade, and that Money is the measuring rod and its terms the
language.
To go farther into this Economic field would necessitate a surface
survey of Economic intricacies, and these pages aim only at
clarifying fundamentals. Having returned from the Basic Facts, upon
which all Economic details rest, to the Money surface with which it
began, our common-sense primer for advanced students is at the
end of its task.
SEVENTH LESSON
REVIEW
THE science of Economics, having now been traced from its surface
to its three Basic Facts and back to the surface, let us, for the
purpose of bringing the whole subject compactly within its narrowest
limits, retrace our steps briskly but thoughtfully by way of review.
Economic accomplishments are measured by Money standards
and expressed in Money terms. Resting on the surface, those
standards and terms spread over the whole Economic area.
Beneath that surface we first find Trade, for which Money is the
medium or the means of expressing relative values and adjusting
balances. Trade consists essentially in interchanges of commodities,
inclusive of natural resources and of human service. It is not an
arbitrary custom or set of customs, but a phenomenon of natural law
through which artificial objects are produced to completion and final
delivery. But Trade, though lying beneath the Money surface of
Economics, is not a basic fact of that science.
Only by piercing through the Trade surface as well as the Money
surface, can the bottom level of the Basic Facts of Economics be
reached. Those facts consist of distinct categories which
comprehend in generalized forms the myriads of miscellaneous facts
with which the Science of Economics is concerned.
Of those categories or Basic Facts there are in number neither
more nor less than three—Man, Natural Resources, Artificial
Objects.
All Artificial Objects are produced by Man from and upon Natural
Resources. The technical term for the activities of Man in that
connection is Labor; for Natural Resources, Land; and for Artificial
Objects, Wealth. In technical Economic terms, therefore, all Wealth
is produced from and upon Land by Labor.
Many colloquial and business subdivisions of those three
categories may be useful provided they be not mixed in their
meanings.
One of those subdivisions is Capital, which, in its technical
meaning, is distinctively a part of Wealth produced by Labor from
and upon Land. It is, however, often used loosely to include Land,
the technical term for Natural Resources. Even slaves, and by
Economic as well as by private business classification, have been
placed in the subcategory called Capital, a form of Wealth; and this
notwithstanding that as units of the human factor, slaves belong in
the Labor category of Economics. Although such loose distinctions
may be of use in private business accountings, they are intolerable
in the science of Economics, which, like every other science,
demands precision in the differentiation of terms.
The application of Man’s powers of body and mind to Natural
Resources for the production of Artificial Objects—of Labor to Land
for the production of Wealth—is the Productive Process in
Economics. It involves such subcategories as business enterprise,
professional service, invention, hired-man work—in a word, every
grade of useful activity. These subcategories are developed by
industrial specialization, or, in technical Economic terms, Division of
Labor, which necessitates another subcategory. This is Trade.
Without Trade, products of Labor specialization would remain
forever useless; but through Trade the most minute and incomplete
of those products is brought to its useful place in the aggregate of
Wealth—ploughshares to ploughframes, for instance, or ore to the
steel of the factory, or wallpaper to the interior of the house.
The Productive Process though intricate through specialization
and Trade, is readily observable by generalization into the three
major categories, Labor and Land and Wealth. In observing that
Process care must be taken to distinguish delivery from Distribution.
Delivery is part of the Productive Process. No Wealth is completely
produced until it has been delivered to ultimate consumers. But
Distribution has to do with Wealth apportionment.
In apportionment, or Distribution, there are two major categories,
Wages and Rent, corresponding respectively to the two Production
categories, Labor and Land. A minor Distributive category,
corresponding to the minor category in Production called Capital, is
distinguished as Interest. This term identifies the earnings of Capital.
Inasmuch, however, as Capital is part of Labor-produced Wealth,
Interest must be a subdivision of Labor-earned Wages.
The Wages category in Distribution comprises, fundamentally, all
that part of Labor-produced Wealth which is not allocated by natural
Economic law to Rent for permission to use Land. This allocation is
determined by the greater desirability of some Natural-Resource
locations (Land) over the most desirable that may be had for the
taking—of those at the “Margin of Production” as it is technically
called, the “margin of cultivation” as it was called when agricultural
areas alone were thought of as Land, at the Economic frontier as it
may be most significantly described.
All assignments of Wealth in Distribution being determined by
comparisons of desirability of service (Value measured in terms of
Money), we find ourselves at the close of our brief review back at the
Money surface of Economics where we began our delving expedition
down to the Basic Facts.
As a result of that expedition we know, if we think with clarity and
fidelity, that Economics is the science, not of making Money, but of
Producing and Distributing Artificial Objects from and upon Natural
Resources by Man. The usefulness of our expedition depends upon
our grasp of and fidelity to the generalization of all Economic facts
into those Basic Facts which are respectively distinguished in
Economic terminology as Land, Labor and Wealth.
Questions for Self-Examination
I
II
III
IV
V
1.—Describe the Productive Process as explained in the
foregoing pages.
2.—Describe it as in your judgment it ought to be described.
VI
VII