Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Contents
- Introduction
- Lost in Transition? Domestic Courts, International Law and Rule of Law ‘À la Carte’
- International Law in the Russian Courts in Transitional Situations
- Thickening the Rule of Law in Transition: The Constitutional Entrenchment of Economic and Social Rights in South Africa
- Judicial Activism and the Use of International Law as Gap-Filler in Domestic Law: The Case of Forced Disappearances Committed During the Armed Conflict in Nepal
- International Law and Iraqi Courts
- Constitutionalism without Governance: International Standards in the Afghan Legal System
- Understandings of International Law in Rwanda: A Contextual Approach
- Virtuous Flexibility. The Application of International Human Rights Norms by the Bosnian Human Rights Chamber
- War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Seeding “International Standards of Justice”?
- Prosecution of War Crimes in Bosnian Cantonal and District Courts: the Role of the Rule of Law
- War Crimes Prosecution in a Post-Conflict Era and a Pluralism of Jurisdictions: the Experience of the Belgrade War Crimes Chamber
- The Treatment of Occupation Legislation by Courts in Liberated Territories
- The Use and Abuse of International Law: Choice of Applicable Criminal Law in Post-Conflict East Timor
- Concluding Observations
Constitutionalism without Governance: International Standards in the Afghan Legal System
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Contents
- Introduction
- Lost in Transition? Domestic Courts, International Law and Rule of Law ‘À la Carte’
- International Law in the Russian Courts in Transitional Situations
- Thickening the Rule of Law in Transition: The Constitutional Entrenchment of Economic and Social Rights in South Africa
- Judicial Activism and the Use of International Law as Gap-Filler in Domestic Law: The Case of Forced Disappearances Committed During the Armed Conflict in Nepal
- International Law and Iraqi Courts
- Constitutionalism without Governance: International Standards in the Afghan Legal System
- Understandings of International Law in Rwanda: A Contextual Approach
- Virtuous Flexibility. The Application of International Human Rights Norms by the Bosnian Human Rights Chamber
- War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Seeding “International Standards of Justice”?
- Prosecution of War Crimes in Bosnian Cantonal and District Courts: the Role of the Rule of Law
- War Crimes Prosecution in a Post-Conflict Era and a Pluralism of Jurisdictions: the Experience of the Belgrade War Crimes Chamber
- The Treatment of Occupation Legislation by Courts in Liberated Territories
- The Use and Abuse of International Law: Choice of Applicable Criminal Law in Post-Conflict East Timor
- Concluding Observations
Summary
INTRODUCTION: THE ROLE OF LAW IN STABILISING CONFLICT
There has been a lot of attention in recent years about improving the quality of legal systems in overseas jurisdictions. This is reflected in the growing proportion of rule of law components in development assistance and, especially, in postconflict stabilisation missions. External actors endeavour to strengthen the role of international legal standards in the courts and, more broadly, the political life of societies emerging from violent conflict. Virtually all stabilisation missions contain today important rule of law components, a shift in emphasis that is mirrored in bilateral financial assistance. The international engagement in Afghanistan since December 2001 has been no exception, having placed a heavy emphasis on introducing international legal norms into the Afghan legal and political system.
This concerted interest in the rule of law in peripheral overseas societies is generally justified by reference to the normative conviction that human beings are equal and deserve equal protection, thus calling for the application of uniform international standards. This essentially moral position is sometimes cloaked in the language of enlightened self-interest, claiming that the protection of equal norms abroad will prevent negative spill-over in the future:
For we live in a world in which apathy about what happens in ‘far away countries of which we know nothing’ can all too easily lead – through contagion, through the message such moral passivity sends to troublemakers, would-be tyrants, and ethnic cleansers elsewhere – not to the kind of Armageddon we feared during the Cold War but to a creeping escalation of disorder and beastliness that will, sooner or later, reach the shores of the complacent, the rich, and the indifferent.
To many, the veracity of this causal chain was powerfully affirmed by the painful experience of the attacks of September 2001, which directly led to the costly and on-going military intervention in Afghanistan. According to this popular reading of history, societal collapse can never be contained, but will eventually reverberate through the international system.
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- Publisher: IntersentiaPrint publication year: 2012