ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part considers briefly some of the global challenges to international criminal law (ICL). It analyzes three significant ways in which ICL differs from national criminal justice, focusing on the distinctive nature of the communities, crimes, and perpetrators implicated by ICL generally and international tribunals applying ICL in particular. The part explores whether and to what extent the collective and psychological pathologies manifest in ICL crimes should bear on their punishment. It traces the transition in ICL penal jurisprudence from a relatively crude retributive impulse, exemplified by the post-World War II trials of the Axis war criminals, to the increasingly complex, but largely haphazard, approach manifest in the judgments of the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The part also argues that the expressive capacity of punishment best accommodates the confluence of ICL and international human rights law.
