The interests of justice in the practice of international criminal law
Among the concepts that apply within the international criminal justice system the ‘interests of justice’ frequently emerges. This apparently intuitive concept appears in several statutes, conventions, regulations, codes and legislative tools in general. The ‘interests of justice’ has been unanimously, expressly, and implicitly qualified as undefined concept within the international criminal practice. Despite its recognised indefinite nature, it has often applied and invoked to counterbalance several procedural guarantees of the parties in international criminal proceedings, or to allow courts, tribunals and the prosecution to exercise a certain grade of discretion. During the last few years, the matter related to the ‘interests of justice’, considering its inclusion in Article 53 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, returned on spotlight. After the decisions issued by the Pre – Trial Chamber and the Appeals Chamber in 2019 and in 2020 in relation to the investigation for the crimes against humanity and war crimes allegedly committed in Afghanistan since the 1 of May 2003, the debate briefly resumed.. Passing through the sources and the case law of all the international criminal tribunals and the International Criminal Court, this investigation aims at answering the following questions: where the ‘interests of justice’ is located within the international criminal law sources and how the ‘interests of justice’ has been interpreted within the international criminal case law; what is the normative nature of the concept and from which elements can be deduced; how to identify constraints or safeguards that would minimise the issue of legal uncertainty that emerges in the use of the concept from the origin of the international criminal justice system.. The present study also aims at filling the current void in literature with a fully comprehensive work on the interpretation of the ‘interests of justice’ in international criminal tribunals and in the International Criminal Court case law. As procedural paradigm, the ‘interests of justice’ has been interpreted in the case law under a variety of meanings which have given the notion concrete meanings: therefore, the analysis of the international criminal law practice has disclosed a multifaceted concept, which includes and covers a variety of values which the international community should acknowledge.
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