Towards an International Criminal Procedure

Towards an International Criminal Procedure Synopsis

The aim of this book is to develop an international criminal procedural order. The Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was agreed in 1998. This provides a rough outline of a procedure, but it still needs to be made workable for the prosecution of international criminals. Such a procedural order would need to reconcile Continental and Anglo--American approaches. The book therefore contains a comparison between German (i.e. one of the main leading Continental legal systems) criminal procedure and English and US criminal procedure, how they developed historically and philosophically, and where they stand today. It covers the criminal process from the first steps of the investigation up to the imprisonment of the convicted. In addition to this comparative perspective, this study also analyses international human rights law as the basis of an international procedural order. For this purpose the contents of the relevant human rights law is extracted from international agreements and international bodies such as the Human Right Committee or the European Court of Human Rights and applied to the procedure of the existing International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and that of the ICC Statute. As a contribution to the fast-growing field of international criminal law, this book will be of use to all academics, practitioners, and government officials involved with the new International Criminal Court.