Ms Charlotte Carney1
1University of Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Charlotte Carney (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney and recipient of the Gender and Global Governance scholarship. She has research interests in gender, race, and international justice, with her dissertation focusing on hybrid courts. Her current research utilises post structural discourse analysis to explore the (re)production of gendered and racialized power at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL).
Abstract:
International criminal justice (ICJ) has reached something of an impasse, with the field questioning whether reforms to the current system, which is inherently gendered and racialized, can be impactful, or whether it should engage with alternatives – and, if so, how such alternatives might look. This paper reflects on hybrid courts, a proposed alternative to more traditional ICJ mechanisms, such as ad hoc tribunals, or a permanent court. Through an analysis of two hybrid courts, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), this paper finds that while there are some instances of hybrid courts disturbing how power operates within ICJ more broadly, these courts still largely reproduce the same operations of power. This paper finds that engaging with hybridity can obscure these operations of power, presenting hybrid courts as transformative, while distinct forms of marginalisation and discrimination persist, producing justice that continues to disempower and exclude. Accordingly, this paper advocates for a more disruptive approach to ICJ, arguing that we must instead look to abolition for answers about the ‘future’ of ICJ. Abolition considers criminal justice systems as irreconcilable with decolonial, gender-sensitive and race-inclusive justice, arguing that the carcerality of these systems negates their ability to provide transformative forms of justice. By drawing together the analysis of two hybrid courts, and abolition scholarship, this paper highlights how abolition is a necessary intervention to achieve transformative, ‘international’, justice.