Consistency of international sentencing: ICTY and ICTR case study

Abstract

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda are the first, post Cold War international criminal tribunals convicting perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Their sentencing practice has been largely criticized as inconsistent. This quantitative study addresses the criticism and empirically investigates the consistency of international sentencing. The extent to which the selected factors predict sentence length is tested in a multiple regression analysis. The analysis suggests that similar, legally relevant patterns have emerged in the sentencing practice of both tribunals. Sentencing in international criminal practice does not appear to be less consistent than sentencing under domestic jurisdictions.

Penal welfarism ‘gone global’? Comparing international criminal justice to The Culture of Control

“…As part of this, the growing institutionalization of international criminal courts and laws have attracted the attention of criminologists and sociologists to the field (Christensen, 2015). On issues ranging from international sentencing (Holá et al., 2012), perpetrator studies (Anderson, 2017; Houge, 2015; Smeulers et al., 2019), and victims’ needs in response to mass violence (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2012), a ‘supranational criminology’ (Smeulers and Haveman, 2008) – with overlapping links to transitional justice studies, genocide studies, and international criminal justice scholarship generally – has consolidated within criminology.…”

International Customary Law in the Jurisprudence of the ICTY and the ICTR

“…49 While summarizing the above part, it is worth noting that after many discussions, both tribunals concluded that there is no pre-established hierarchy and all crimes tried under its jurisdiction are serious violations of international humanitarian law. 50…”

Using machine learning to predict decisions of the European Court of Human Rights

“…For example, Behn and Langford (2017) manually collected and coded roughly 800 cases on Investment Treaty Arbitration. Others have applied quantitative methods in the analysis of case law of the International Criminal Court (Holá et al 2012;Nollez-Goldbach 2014, 2015), the Court of Justice of the European Union (Lindholm and Derlén 2012;Derlén and Lindholm 2014;Tarissan and Nollez-Goldbach 2016;Derlén and Lindholm 2017a, b;Frankenreiter 2017a, b;Zhang et al 2017) or the European Court of Human Rights (Bruinsma and De Blois 1997;Bruinsma 2007;White and Boussiakou 2009;Christensen et al 2016;Olsen and Küçüksu 2017;Madsen 2018).…”

“…A growing body of papers present results of more sophisticated statistical analyses, including regression analysis of case law (see Dhami and Belton 2016). Most of these papers focus on case law from the USA (see Chien 2011;Epstein et al 2013), but researchers outside of the USA have conducted such analyses as well (Holá et al 2012;Behn and Langford 2017;Bricker 2017;van Dijck 2018;Zhang et al 2017;Frankenreiter 2017aFrankenreiter , 2018.…”