The Right to a Fair Trial in International Criminal Proceedings

This book examines the right to a fair trial in international criminal proceedings from a human rights perspective, drawing mainly from General Comments, Individual Communications to the Human Rights Committee and the jurisprudence of international criminal tribunals and courts. The author shows the extent to which international and hybrid criminal courts, specifically ICTY and ICTR, uphold human rights standards as laid down in the ICCPR. Even though these ad hoc tribunals have been criticized for lengthy trials, they have generously granted accused individuals enormous privileges, such as the right to self-representation, which is not possible in the ECtHR. To reconcile this situation, the author proposes that the ad hoc tribunals could adopt the approach of the ECtHR with regards to length of proceedings, while the ECtHR can learn from the ad hoc tribunals with regards to self-representation.