Tuesday 30 July at 12:00 in the Board Room (MST.09.022)

International criminal law is located within, and perhaps constitutes the culmination of, the ‘anti-impunity agenda’ within international law, policy, and practice. This ‘anti-impunity agenda’ is historically driven by the idea of ‘never again’: a pledge to prevent atrocities that emerged out of the horrors of World War II, and a conviction that criminal sanctions are essential for its realisation. In this way, punishing atrocities is deemed the primary way of deterring and preventing them. The framing of punishment as an imperative in the aftermath of serious violations of international law also assumes an expressive function: it is seen as reclaiming and restoring universal moral principles and victims’ equal moral status – or even their humanity – in a context where these were fundamentally and violently denied. Accordingly, the pursuit of punishment in response to deeply egregious wrongs against persons or humanity at large, and the values such pursuit (purportedly) upholds, has become the ‘justice norm’ within international criminal law and international human rights law.

Event Speakers: Prof. Natasa Mavronicola, University of Birmingham & Dr Mattia Pinto, University of York

Natasa Mavronicola is Professor of Human Rights Law at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham; she is the co-editor of Coercive Human Rights: Positive Duties to Mobilise the Criminal Law under the ECHR (Hart 2020) and author of Torture, Inhumanity and Degradation under Article 3 of the ECHR: Absolute Rights and Absolute Wrongs (Hart 2021).

Mattia Pinto is a Lecturer at York Law School and Centre for Applied Human Rights, and co-programme leader of the LLM in International Human Rights Law and Practice, University of York. Mattia researches and teaches in the areas of human rights, criminal law, social-legal theory, and international law. His PhD dissertation, completed at the LSE, was titled ‘Human Rights as Sources of Penality’.