By Björn Elberling

The ICTY Appeals Chamber today partially granted the appeals of Enver Hadzihasanovic (pictured left) and Amir Kubura, high-ranking officers in the Bosnian army during the Bosnian war. The Trial Chamber had found them guilty of failing to prevent or punish crimes committed by their subordinates and sentenced them to five years and 2 years, six months, respectively. The Appeals Chamber reversed some of these finding and accordingly lowered the sentences to three years, six months and two years, respectively. (The Trial Chamber judgment can be found here, a summary of the Appeals Judgment is available here) As Hadzihasanovic has already spent more than three years in detention and may well be eligible for early release, it is to be expected that he will be released very soon. Kubura had already been granted early release shortly after the Trial Chamber Judgment. [UPDATE: Hadzihasanovic has indeed been released the day after the Appeals Judgment] [And a final UPDATE: The judgment is now available here] Continue reading →

By Björn Elberling

Over at Opinio Juris, there is a discussion on an interesting article by Jenia Iontcheva Turner concerning "Defense Perspectives on Law and Politics in International Criminal Trials". Prof. Turner has interviewed several defence attorneys practicing at the ICTY, ICTR and SCSL about their perspectives on several aspects of trials before the ICTR. I confess to only having skimmed the article so far, but I can already say that I found it very interesting. The article is available here, the blog discussion at OJ here, here and here. Anyway – and here comes my awkward attempt at a segue to the main topic of this post – , Prof. Turner reports that while not too many defence attorneys view the Tribunals as "deeply political", that view is more prevalent at the ICTR than at the ICTY. I have to say that a lot of times when researching the jurisprudence of the ad hoc Tribunals, I can understand that defence attorneys at the ICTR would find their work a bit, well, frustrating to say the least. The most recent example that I chanced upon was that of early release. More below the fold. Warning: This is going to be a bit ranty. Continue reading →

 By Björn Elberling

In the first post, I showed that the general sentencing discount to be achieved by those who plead guilty before the ICTY pleas is not particularly high. I also voiced a suspicion that the discount may be a lot more substantial for high-ranking accused whose statements may be worth more in terms of historiography. This suspicion is confirmed by a look at those few individual judgments in which Trial Chambers did attach numerical values to individual sentencing factors – four of these cases concerned high-ranking political and military leaders. Continue reading →

By Björn Elberling

The first topic I will blog about in some detail, which is a bit of a byproduct of my dissertation, concerns a question of sentencing in international criminal law, namely sentencing in the context of guilty pleas. (The picture to the left shows Stevan Todorovic, one of the first accused to be sentenced after a guilty plea based on a plea agreement) 

Sentencing generally is a very contentious issue, especially for the ICTY, which is often criticized as passing much too lenient sentences – not only, but especially where sentences are the result of a guilty plea based on a plea agreement between prosecutor and accused. The common feeling seems to be that plea bargains have resulted in unduly lenient sentences, that truth and justice have been traded away in return for savings in time and judicial resources, to the detriment of the Tribunals’ legitimacy.

I will try to find out to what extent this is actually the case.

Continue reading →