5 October 2012 | CIL Seminar Series
International Criminal Law in Practice: The challenges of prosecuting and defending mass atrocities
Introduction
In 2004 Colonel General Radislav Krstić, a senior Bosnian Serb military commander, was convicted of aiding and abetting genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (“ ICTY”). He was sentenced to 35 years of imprisonment. His conviction was based on nine days of events in and around Srebrenica, Bosnia Herzegovina, in July 1995. In its judgment the Trial Chamber of the ICTY stated:
The events of the nine days from July 10 to 19 1995 in Srebrenica defy description in their horror and their implications for humankind’s capacity to revert to acts of brutality under the stresses of conflict. In little over one week, thousands of lives were extinguished, irreparably rent or simply wiped from the pages of history.
On 3 February 2012 the Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (“ECCC”) ruled on Kaing Guek Eav’s (alias Comrade Duch) convictions for crimes against humanity and war crimes and increased his sentence to life imprisonment. Comrade Duch was the chairman of S-21, a prison and torture centre in Phnom Penh, during the Democratic Kampuchea period. The ECCC Supreme Court Chamber stated:
The Co-Prosecutors did not exaggerate when they referred to S-21 as the ‘factory of death.’ Kaing Guek Eav commanded and operated this factory of death for more than three years. He is responsible for the merciless termination of at least 12,272 individuals, including women and children.
Andrew Cayley QC was the prosecutor in both of these cases. He believes that international criminal law, and indeed law generally, is best understood through seeing law and facts in action. He presented some of the evidence in both of these cases and then examined the principal legal challenges and findings in each case.
About the Speaker
Andrew Cayley QC is a Queen’s Counsel, and leading international criminal lawyer, who has prosecuted and defended at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (“ICTY”), International Criminal Court (“ICC”), Special Court for Sierra Leone (“SCSL”) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (“ECCC”).
He is currently the United Nations Chief International Co-Prosecutor of the ECCC, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Prior to his appointment in Cambodia Andrew represented Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, before the SCSL and Ivan Čermak before the ICTY. Ivan Čermak was acquitted of all charges against him in April 2011.
As Senior Prosecuting Counsel at the ICC, in The Hague, Andrew was responsible for the Security Council referred investigation into serious human rights violations in the Darfur region of Sudan.
From 2001 to 2005 he was Senior Prosecuting Counsel at the ICTY. He laid the current charges against Ratko Mladić and led the first prosecution of members of the Kosovo Liberation Army for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
From 1994 to 2001 Andrew was Prosecuting Counsel at the ICTY where he worked on many cases including the Krstić case where the prosecution team secured the first conviction for genocide, in Europe, since the Second World War.
Andrew Cayley was educated at Brighton College, University College London and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He speaks widely on international criminal law and most recently has presented papers at Harvard, Yale, and the Free University of Amsterdam.
Presentation
To download Mr Cayley’s presentation in PDF format, click here. Please note that the slides contain images that may be disturbing to viewers.
