Raul C. Pangalangan (LL.M 1986, S.J.D. 1990), Professor of Law and former Law Dean at the University of the Philippines, will look at the ICC, first and foremost, as a court, not as a creature of politics, and ask how courts can confront injustices of historical scale that are not too easily amenable to court-dispensed justice.
The limits contained in the Rome Statute (e.g., the high evidentiary and fair trial standards, the resulting slowness and costliness of ICC procedure, the problem of selectivity, the unenforced arrest warrants vis-a-vis the ICC’s dependence on the support of states, and the requirement of victim participation and reparations) have been pictured as design flaws inherent in the project of international criminal justice. Pangalangan proposes that they instead call on us to reconceive the kind of justice that we seek, and ask whether judicial power as defined in the domestic sphere is transformed when exercised at the international sphere.
A light lunch will be provided.
Speaker:
Raul C. Pangalangan (LL.M 1986, S.J.D. 1990) is a Professor of Law and former Law Dean at the University of the Philippines. He was a Judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC) from 2015-21, where he presided over the first ICC case on the war crime of attacking cultural and religious heritage, and sat in landmark cases involving child soldiers, forced marriages, and sexual slavery. In 2022-23, he chaired the ILO Commission of Inquiry on Myanmar. For this school year, he is a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. He is a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (The Hague) and Chair of the Philippine National Group at the PCA. He is an Associate Member of the Institut de Droit International, and has served as a Visiting Professor at HLS.
This event is organized by HLS East Asian Legal Studies and co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program; the Harvard International Law Journal; and HLS Advocates.