EJIL: Talk!

Blog of the European Journal of International Law

Articles posted by Aldo Zammit Borda

Comparative Law and the Ad Hoc Tribunals: A Reply to Jaye Ellis’ Rejoinder

Published on June 19, 2012 Author: Aldo Zammit Borda

In her rejoinder to my post, Jaye Ellis underscores that “comparative law could help international judges understand general principles as an opportunity to learn from municipal legal systems, rather than as a means of transferring pieces of legal machinery from one system to another”.

Insofar as comparative law is considered merely as an opportunity to “learn” from municipal legal systems, then the matter is relatively uncontroversial. A perhaps more controversial question, however, is: how are the lessons learnt from comparative law to be used?

While some authors, on the one hand, have suggested that the lessons from comparative law may provide safeguards against judges who attempt to legitimate a posteriori a solution that they have already chosen (see Delmas-Marty, The Contribution of Comparative Law to a Pluralist Conception of International Criminal Law, Journal of International Criminal Justice (2003)).

On the other hand, some commentators have suggested that comparative law may be used for precisely the converse reason. Judge Cassese, for instance, intimated that:

Mon experience est que souvent le droit compare est utilise pour confirmer une solution que l’on avait déjà trouvée.(cited in Bohlander and Findlay, The Use of Domestic Sources as a Basis for International Criminal Law Principles, in the Global Community Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence (2002)).

It is perhaps this apprehension which explains Judge Cassese’s categorical stance in Erdemović, in relation to the acceptance by the Tribunal of a guilty plea. While the Tribunal concluded that it could restrict its search solely to common law adversarial systems from which the rule was derived, Judge Cassese insisted that such a narrow inquiry was unacceptable. Read the rest of this entry…

Filed under: Comparative Law, EJIL Analysis, General Principles of International Law, International Tribunals, Sources of International Law

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Comparative Law and the Ad Hoc Tribunals: A Reply to Jaye Ellis

Published on June 1, 2012 Author: Aldo Zammit Borda

Aldo Zammit Borda is a PhD candidate at Trinity College, University of Dublin and a Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. Previously, he served as First Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Malta, and as Legal Editor, Commonwealth Secretariat, London.

1. Introduction

This post seeks to engage with Jaye Ellis’ article on ‘General Principles and Comparative Law’ (22 EJIL (2011) 4, 949–971). While it agrees with Ellis’ general proposition that comparative law provides a valuable resource for the identification of general principles of law, it argues that there are important distinctions to be drawn between the comparative law method and the review of evidence for the purpose of clarifying customary international law and general principles of law. In particular, the argument is made that the identification of general principles is not, as Ellis suggests, the mechanical extraction of the essence of rules. Rather, it is the juridical identification of a common underlying sense of what is just in the circumstances. In her article, Ellis was critical of the late Judge Cassese’s position in Erdemovic, for insisting that an approach which relied primarily on common law systems for guidance on the guilty plea was “unacceptable.” This post however agrees with Judge Cassese’s position and underscores the dangers in accepting narrow inquiries, which at best attach special weight and at worst restrict the scope of inquiry to a single, specific legal system.

2. Comparative Law And The Ad Hoc Tribunals

In ‘The Science of Comparative Law’ (7 Cambridge LJ (1939-1941) 94), Schmitthoff observes that “The first phase consists in examining the reaction of a number of legal systems to an individual legal problem. The second stage is concerned with the utilization of the results obtained in the first phase, and this utilization can be effected for a great variety of reasons.”

This post will mainly be concerned with the first phase of comparative law (the “collation of facts” phase), which assumes, as a prerequisite, that the topics under examination must be comparable. Schmitthoff states that comparative law has to confine itself to legal systems which have reached the same (comparable) level of evolution. Establishing a basis of comparability for the relevant topics is therefore a prerequisite of comparative law. For Barak, this basis of comparability is a common ideology. He states that, with respect to democratic legal systems, a meaningful comparison could only be had with other democratic legal systems.

A. The Application Of Comparative Law By The Ad Hoc Tribunals

Delmas-Marty observed that the attraction of comparative law stems from the sources of international criminal law, at least to the extent that custom and general principles of law are partly based on national law. (‘The Contribution of Comparative Law to a Pluralist Conception of International Criminal Law’, 1 J International Criminal Justice (2003) 13)

1. Comparative Law And Customary International Law

The process of clarifying customary international law requires reviewing evidence from, inter alia, national jurisdictions in order to make out its material sources, namely State practice and opinio juris. The process of reviewing evidence in this context resembles Schmitthoff’s first phase of comparative law, namely, the “collation of facts” phase. Read the rest of this entry…