Ms Mareen Brosinsky1
1University Of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
Biography:
Mareen Brosinsky is a PhD candidate at the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales. She is a Doctoral Fellow at the Future of Rights Centre at the University of Wollongong and a former Junior Research Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She works as a Research Assistant for an ARC-funded project on creating accountability for forced displacement crimes. Her research focuses on norm contestation, accountability and universal jurisdiction as a domestic accountability mechanism to respond to international crimes.
Abstract:
Universal jurisdiction (UJ) is an established principle in international law. The majority of states have enshrined provisions to exercise the principle in their domestic legal codes. At the same time, practices of UJ remain selective, divers and inconsistent, the annual debate at the General Assembly reveals persistent ambiguity and differing interpretations of the principle, national prosecutors and judges are frequently confronted with determining whether or not UJ can be exercised in specific contexts: from Pinochet’s arrest to the recent arrest warrant against Assad by French authorities, from Argentina’s investigations into Myanmar’s military leadership to Germany’s first convictions for crimes committed in Syria and Iraq, UJ practices have triggered debates, set precedents and pushed boundaries on questions of immunities, the scope of crimes, or the relationship to other accountability mechanisms such as the International Criminal Court.
By bringing IR theory on norm contestation in conversation with socio-legal theories on global norm making, this paper examines how the high level of indeterminacy and ambiguity of an international norm like UJ inherently requires clarification through interpretation and practice within a transnational space. It exposes (1) how domestic judicial systems become the sites of contestation in which actors, first and foremost the judiciaries and civil society groups, generate meaning of the principle by creating legal standards and challenging core international concepts; and (2) how these practices stimulate critical engagement with the norm within an interactive transnational multilogue that seeks to further develop and promote conceptual clarity and consensus on the norm’s scope and meaning.