Skouteris Explains Why—and How—“Place” Matters in International Criminal Law

During a faculty seminar at the School of Public Policy on December 5, Associate Professor Thomas Skouteris reported on his ongoing research: a monograph entitled Placing International Law: Jurisdiction, Authority, Technique (Routledge, 2015) that he is co-authoring with Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne), Robert Wai (Osgoode Hall), Fleur Johns (New South Wales), and Shaun McVeigh (Melbourne). 

Skouteris explained that when they seek knowledge about the law, lawyers traditionally focus on time. “They—we—are obsessed with time,” he said. Skouteris said that what he and his co-authors are doing is to look at the role of place in the production of legal authority. This book will show that what they call “practices of placement” enliven legal work in vital ways which are distinct from (yet implicated in) traditional concerns about jurisdiction and applicable law. They help to generate law's inhabitability and an associated sense of fealty to law.

Skouteris argued that post-1989 international criminal law found a vital sense of place in the form of the “international city.” He looked at The Hague, a site central to the development of international criminal justice and often referred to as the “city of justice, peace, and security.” He told the story of the international city as a distinct "practice of emplacement" and explored the ways in which it constitutes an enabling place for the production, authority, and transmission of the law.

Skouteris noted that a mythistory has developed around The Hague, both spontaneously and as a result of a very deliberate campaign. There are solid facts supporting this mythistory: The Hague is indeed the seat of seven international courts, of 130 NGOs and agencies, of seven international organizations; etc. Facts however have been emplotted in a self-serving narrative that makes wider claims of the City as the “intoxicating place of an earthly utopia,” a place that allows "an alternate (if fleeting) ordering of ideas about how the international community should be regulated."

Skouteris explained that this mythistory has been internalized by international lawyers as part of their personal lived experiences in The Hague. “These individual narratives,” Skouteris said, “are now part of the city’s official narrative.” As a result, many people now believe that there is something about The Hague that is conducive to justice. “There is this feeling that it is The Hague that makes criminal justice real, that gives it authority,” said Skouteris. A broad range of legal practices use this mythistory as the backdrop for their authority.

As the reputation of The Hague as a “City Without Walls” or a “Haven for Free Thought” grows, so too does the reputation of international criminal law. Skouteris said that the reputation exceeded the reality. “International criminal law has achieved more on a symbolic level than in terms of meetings its goals,” he said. The international city, as a site where criminal justice can be practiced, generates a sense of fealty and enables faith in the project as a whole in ways that elude traditional approaches to law.