International Courts

   The sexually violent murder of twenty-one-year-old British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, on the night of November 1, 2007, became an international sensation when one of Kercher’s housemates, twenty-year-old Seattle native Amanda Knox, as well as her Italian boyfriend and a troubled local man Knox said she “vaguely” knew, was arrested and charged with the murder. The Fatal Gift of Beauty is award-winning author and journalist Nina Burleigh’s mesmerizing literary investigation of the murder, the controversial prosecution, the conviction and twenty-six-year sentence of Knox, the machinations of Italian justice, and the underground depravity and clash of cultures in one of central -Italy’s most beloved cities.

      When Perugia authorities concluded that the murder was part of a dark, twisted rite—a “sex game”—led by the American with an uncanny resemblance to Perugia’s Madonna, they unleashed a media frenzy from Rome to London to New York and Seattle. The story drew an international cult obsessed with “Foxy Knoxy,” a pretty honor student on a junior year abroad, who either woke up one morning into a nightmare of superstition and misogyny—the dark side of Italy—or participated in something unspeakable.

      The investigation begins in the old stone cottage overlooking bucolic olive groves where Kercher’s body was found in her locked bedroom. It winds through the shadowy, arched alleys of Perugia, a city of art that is also a magnet for tens of thousands of students who frequent its bars, clubs, and drug bazaar on the steps of the Duomo. It climaxes in an up-close account of Italy’s dysfunctional legal system, as the trial slowly unfolds at the town’s Tribunale, and the prosecution’s thunderous final appeal to God before the quivering girl defendant resembles a scene from the Inquisition. 

      To reveal what actually happened on that terrible night after Halloween, Nina Burleigh lived in Perugia, attended the trial, and corresponded with the incarcerated defendants. She also delved deeply into the history, secrets, and customs of Perugia, renowned equally for its Etruscan tunnels, early Christian art, medieval sorcerers, and pagan roots.

      The Fatal Gift of Beauty is a thoughtful, compelling examination of an enduring mystery, an ancient, storied place, and a disquieting facet of Italian culture: an obsession with female eroticism. It is also an acute window into the minds and personalities of the accused killers and of the conservative Italian magistrate striving to make sense of an inexplicable act of evil. But at its core is an indelible portrait of Amanda Knox, the strangely childlike, enigmatic beauty, whose photogenic face became the focal point of international speculation about the shadow side of youth and freedom.

The ICC is the first and only standing international court capable of prosecuting humanity's worst crimes: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It faces huge obstacles. It has no police force; it pursues investigations in areas of tremendous turmoil, conflict, and death; it is charged both with trying suspects and with aiding their victims; and it seeks to combine divergent legal traditions in an entirely new international legal mechanism. International law advocates sought to establish a standing international criminal court for more than 150 years. Other, temporary, single-purpose criminal tribunals, truth commissions, and special courts have come and gone, but the ICC is the only permanent inheritor of the Nuremberg legacy. In Building the International Criminal Court, Oberlin College Professor of Politics Ben Schiff analyzes the ICC, melding historical perspective, international relations theories, and observers' insights to explain the Court's origins, creation, innovations, dynamics, and operational challenges.

The exceptionality of America's Supreme Court has long been conventional wisdom. But the United States Supreme Court is no longer the only one changing the landscape of public rights and values. Over the past thirty years, the European Court of Human Rights has developed an ambitious, American-style body of law. Unheralded by the mass press, this obscure tribunal in Strasbourg, France has become, in many ways, the Supreme Court of Europe.
Michael Goldhaber introduces American audiences to the judicial arm of the Council of Europe-a group distinct from the European Union, and much larger-whose mission is centered on interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council routinely confronts nations over their most culturally-sensitive, hot-button issues. It has stared down France on the issue of Muslim immigration; Ireland on abortion; Greece on Greek Orthodoxy; Turkey on Kurdish separatism; Austria on Nazism; and Britain on gay rights and corporal punishment. And what is most extraordinary is that nations commonly comply.

In the battle for the world's conscience, Goldhaber shows how the court in Strasbourg may be pulling ahead.

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights deals with the cases which raise most important and leading legal issues and serious questions affecting the interpretation and application of the European Convention of Human Rights. Its decisions and judgements represent the leading case-law of the Court, which is relevant, decisive, influencing and binding for the legal opinions of the Chambers. This book contains a collection of judgements and decisions of the Grand Chamber of the 'new' European Court of Human Rights ('the Court'), adopted since November 1998, classified in a chronological order. Each part includes a summary of relevant facts and the Court's legal analyses and opinions. This book is a useful and practical tool for legal and human rights professionals, judges, advocates, law professors, academics, students and legal experts and is accessible to the large public involved in human rights and humanitarian affairs as well.

The Rome Statute creating a permanent international criminal court was adopted on 17 July 1998 at the United Nations Conference in Rome. This publication is a collective work by a group of persons closely associated with the actual making of the Rome Statute. It covers the substantive and procedural issues raised during the preparatory stages as well as the Conference. These active participants in the Conference provide an account of the main contentions on each of the key issues, the divergent approaches put forward by the principal proponents, how differences were resolved, how groups of articles were prepared, and how the final text as a whole was assembled. All the authors served certain key functions during the Conference, most of them chaired or co-ordinated the work of a committee, a working group or a negotiating body, all of which together produced the Statute. Their professional acount of the work of the Conference makes this publication a resource for any States contemplating ratification and preparing national implementation legislation. This book gives the insiders' reportage of the negotiations that culminated in this momentous Statute.