Building An Abolition Movement for International Criminal Law?

Abstract

International criminal law is a carceral system, which responds to mass atrocities by holding some individuals criminally responsible for these events and then, generally, imprisoning those individuals. I ask what alternative responses might be envisaged, and if we can build a carceral abolitionist movement for international criminal law. Such a movement would refuse imprisonment and policing as the main responses to mass atrocity, and instead would seek to understand the social causes and conditions that cause such mass atrocity, and also how (and why) criminal law has become the preeminent ‘legitimate hand of justice’. In this article, I attempt to bring into conversation two particular intellectual movements: the collective scholarship and praxis of domestic carceral abolition movements; and those critical scholars of international criminal law who have already set out some of the limits and possibilities of the field. I set out the structural conditions of international criminal law, particularly its ideological grounding in neoliberalism and its relationships to race, global capital and colonialism and imperialism, which result in a legal system that criminalizes some and exonerates others. I then particularly examine some tools that already exist for building an abolition movement for international criminal law. These include the defence of duress, transformative reparations and the role of defence lawyers. These tools are admittedly part of the carceral system, and therefore cannot be the key to an abolition movement for international criminal law. However, they may assist us in the short or medium term as we imagine and work towards a better world without the need for a carceral system of international criminal law that relies on police and prisons.