Why being there mattered : staged transparency at the International Criminal Court
D'hondt, S. (2021). Why being there mattered : staged transparency at the International Criminal Court. Journal of Pragmatics, 183, 168-178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.07.014
Published in
Journal of PragmaticsAuthors
Date
2021Copyright
© 2021 the Author
The International Criminal Court (ICC) represents a criminal justice setting exceptionally welcoming to discourse scholars. The court website provides ample information about ongoing cases, hearings are livestreamed, and transcripts, video footage, and other relevant documents are available online. Against this background of comprehensive transparency, this paper explores the additional value of physically attending ICC trial hearings. An auto-ethnography of how the ICC court landscape structures the visitor's path to the courtroom gallery, it is claimed, brings out the staged nature of the Court's projection of transparency. The ensuing discussion explicates the implications of these staging practices for the hearing transcripts published on the ICC website. It is argued that these transcripts contribute to this projection of transparency by obfuscating the processes through which the Court constitutes its audiences, both the ‘physical’ gallery audience as well as its ‘virtual’ counterpart browsing through the materials on the ICC website. In this sense, the paper enhances our understanding of ICC hearing transcripts as ethnographic objects, because it shows that their sociocultural entanglements also extend to the ways in which they are disseminated and the role they play in staging the ICC as a transparent institution.
...
Publisher
ElsevierISSN Search the Publication Forum
0378-2166Keywords
Publication in research information system
https://converis.jyu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/99278832
Metadata
Show full item recordCollections
Related funder(s)
Research Council of FinlandFunding program(s)
Academy Project, AoFAdditional information about funding
Academy of Finland, project number 325535 (“Negotiating international criminal law: An courtroom ethnography of trial performance at the International Criminal Court”, 2019–2023).License
Related items
Showing items with similar title or keywords.
-
Much Cry and Little Wool? : Determining the Exact Role of the Inter-national Criminal Court in Transitional Justice Efforts
Perez-Leon-Acevedo, Juan-Pablo (California Western School of Law, 2021) -
Disentangling Law and Religion in the Rohingya Case at the International Criminal Court
Pérez-León-Acevedo, Juan-Pablo; Pinto, Thiago Alves (Routledge, 2021)The Rohingya are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. Military campaigns conducted by Myanmar against the Rohingya have led to numerous deaths, widespread cases of sexual violence, the destruction of hundreds ... -
Trajectories of spirituality : Producing and assessing cultural evidence at the International Criminal Court
D'hondt, Sigurd; Pérez-León-Acevedo, Juan-Pablo; Ferraz de Almeida, Fabio; Barrett, Elena (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2024)In this article, we examine the production and assessment of evidence about spirit beliefs in the international criminal trial of Ugandan rebel commander Dominic Ongwen, submitted by the defense to show that their client ... -
Humanity and Its Beneficiaries : Footing and Stance-Taking in an International Criminal Trial
D’hond, Sigurd (University of Chicago Press, 2019)This article elucidates the role of metapragmatic devices like footing and stance-taking in trial hearings before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It focuses on the case of Ahmad al Faqi al Mahdi, a ... -
Victims at the Central African Republic's Special Criminal Court
Perez-Leon-Acevedo, Juan-Pablo (Taylor & Francis, 2021)The Central African Republic's Special Criminal Court (SCC), the latest hybrid criminal tribunal, may be considered an important legal development concerning victims of mass atrocities in international criminal justice ...