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Global Justice or Global Revenge?


Global Justice or Global Revenge? International Criminal Justice at the Crossroads (2003) is a book by Austrian philosopher Hans Köchler, who was appointed by the United Nations as observer of the Lockerbie bombing trial in the Netherlands (2000-2002). Turkish and Indian editions of the book were published in 2005, an Arabic edition was published in 2011.

The book deals with the evolving concept of universal jurisdiction, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, legal questions of international terrorism, and whether international criminal justice can at all be practiced in the absence of a global balance of power. The book analyzes the various international criminal courts since Nuremberg and provides a critical assessment of the prospects of the International Criminal Court. It challenges the assumption of established legal theory in which the normative framework of criminal justice can be abstracted from actual power relations and offers elements of a new doctrine on the "dialectical relationship" between power and law.

The gradual assertion of the International Criminal Court's authority will be the test case for the separation of powers, which is the indispensable requirement of the rule of law, whether at the national or international level. Only a fully independent international court will guarantee that a system of global justice, associated with universal jurisdiction, will not turn into a system of global revenge where political interests, not the principles of impartiality and fairness, determine the practice of international criminal law.


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