This month

• Guidelines for Admissions of Guilt
• New publications
• Open source intelligence

Guidelines  for admissions of guilt

The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Rome Statute provides that an accused person may accept criminal responsibility for the crimes with which he or she
is charged. It uses the term “admission of guilt” and prescribes an abbreviated trial procedure by which the Trial Chamber may accept, or reject, the admission of guilt. The provision in the Rome Statute represents a compromise between traditional common law and civil law approaches.

To date, one person has made an admission of guilt at the ICC. More generally, however, guilty pleas and plea agreements have become an established feature of international criminal justice. Since the first guilty plea at an ad hoc tribunal in 1996, 29 other accused persons at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) have pleaded guilty, in all but two instances pursuant to agreements with the Prosecutors of those tribunals. Guilty plea provisions also appear, but have not been used, in the Rules of Procedure and Evidence of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (“SCSL”) and the Rules of Procedure and Evidence of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (“STL”).

In light of this history and the provisions of the provision in the Rome Statute itself, admissions of guilt—and agreements regarding the same—are a tool available to the ICC Prosecutor in combating impunity through the prosecution of individuals responsible for serious international crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC. The purpose of these guidelines is to set forth the ICC Prosecutor’s policy with respect to agreements regarding admission of guilt, in particular, whether and when it may be appropriate for the Office of the Prosecutor to enter into such agreements, and if so under what circumstances and subject to which terms.

New publications

The Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher (TOAEP) has published:

• Nuremberg Academy Series: Integrity in International Justice, edited by Morten Bergsmo and Vivianne E. Dittrich
• Publication series: Colonial Wrongs and Access to International Law, edited by Morten Bergsmo, Wolfgang Kaleck and Kyaw Yin Hlaing
• Publication series: Quality Control in Criminal Investigation, edited by Xabier Agirre Aranburu, Morten Bergsmo, Simon De Smet and Carsten Stahn

Scandinavian Studies in Law

• Volume 66: Investigation and prosecution in Scandinavia of International Crimes

Open source intelligence

International Criminal Investigations depend more and more on open digital investigations and investigative techniques. Some interesting resources are freely available:

• Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit
• Bellingcat’s website: guides, resources, useful tags
• Freedomlab’s  Open Source Investigation for Human Rights (OSINT) toolkit
• Reuser’s Information Services: quick reference sheets, OSINT repertorium, OSINT resources