Search

This article examines the most recent shift in ongoing debates concerning the relationship between international criminal law and transitional justice, using the examples of international criminal prosecutions before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and transitional justice mechanisms in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It reframes the problematic relationship between the two fields by revisiting the important but underexplored concept of ‘the social’ that underpins these two very different models of international justice. The article draws on the work of Bruno Latour, who argues that we should study law by analysing how its practices construct ‘the social.’ Building on this approach, the article shows how international criminal law and transitional justice offer different ways of reassembling social relationships after conflict. While transitional justice seeks to reassemble a society in conflict through ‘justice’ processes, international criminal law seeks to make social ties through ‘law.’ The current shift in justice discourses reveals that what is ultimately at stake in these debates is the fundamental question of how international justice can reassemble ‘the social’ in more just forms after conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has generated huge archival holdings. With the ICTY’s impending closure, the archive has become part of broader debates regarding its legacy for the former Yugoslavia. In particular, the memorial function of this archive has now become highly contentious. Ultimately, these concern the relationship between law and collective memory. This article uses the example of the ICTY archive to explore the relationship between law and memory in post-conflict transition. It argues that this ‘legal archive’ functions as a mnemonic system that produces ‘legal memory’ through its juridical, international, and transitional structure. It then considers the competing discourses of how the legal archive remembers or forgets the justice of law and the injustice of war. Ultimately, these discourses figure the archive as a ‘legal memorial’ that fails to produce collective memory. For this reason, I develop an alternative concept of ‘memorial law’ in order to suggest other memorial practices that can sustain legal memory as a living memory, rather than as a dead archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protecting victims and punishing perpetrators are now seen as integral elements of the implementation and enforcement of humanitarian norms. However, how international law constructs the victims and perpetrators of international crimes as entities with rights and duties remains insufficiently examined. This paper explores the different models of victims and perpetrators as legal persons in international criminal law. It argues that the legal person takes two forms: the victim of human rights and the perpetrator of criminal responsibility. While the legal regime presents these as autonomous and singular individuals, it also constitutes them as members of groups that criminal norms seek to protect or punish. Contemporary international criminal law resolves this tension between individual and collective rights and responsibilities by reconstituting legal subjectivity through an intersubjective conception of the universal community of humans. Ultimately, this 'legal person' relies on the idea of 'humanity', the collectivity of all humans, to hide this problematic conceptual basis of the rights and duties of victims and perpetrators in ICL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context Recent case reports detail the successful use of temozolomide in the management of aggressive pituitary tumours. O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) is a DNA repair protein that counteracts the effect of temozolomide. Objective To study MGMT expression in pituitary tumours and consider whether MGMT expression is associated with response to temozolomide therapy in aggressive pituitary tumours. Patients We report two patients with aggressive pituitary tumours treated with temozolomide, one who responded to temozolomide and the other who did not. MGMT expression was assessed in a further 88 archived pituitary tumour samples. Design MGMT expression was assessed by immunohistochemistry. MGMT promoter methylation was studied by methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction (MSP), sequencing of MGMT was performed and loss of heterozygosity (LOH) analysis undertaken. Results Low MGMT expression and MGMT promoter methylation were found in the pituitary tumour of the patient who responded to temozolomide. Conversely, high MGMT expression was seen in the patient demonstrating a poor response to temozolomide. Eleven out of 88 archived tumour samples (13%) had low MGMT expression. Prolactinomas were more likely to have low MGMT expression compared with other pituitary tumour subtypes ( P < 0·001). There was no significant difference in MGMT expression between invasive and noninvasive tumours, or between recurrent and nonrecurrent tumours. A significant inverse correlation was found between MGMT expression and promoter methylation ( P = 0·012). Conclusion MGMT expression as assessed by immunohistochemistry may predict response to temozolomide therapy in patients with aggressive pituitary tumours. MGMT promoter methylation is likely to explain low MGMT expression in some, but not all, pituitary tumours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent efforts to develop and implement progressive models of transitional justice have been significantly influenced by major developments in the law concerning sexual violence in armed conflict. In particular, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has pioneered accountability for sexual violence against women in armed conflict. This article takes the ICTY as a case study of how gender can structure the accountability mechanisms of transitional justice. The article analyses how legal norms and practices instantiate and reiterate, rather than transform, existing hierarchical gender relations. It considers the existing models of sexual violence as a criminal harm under international law, and then examines gendered patterns of legal practice in ICTY prosecutions. To address this engendering of transitional justice, the article produces a new model of the harm of sexual violence in conflict, suggests the development of a new international offence of sexual violence and generates different strategies for international prosecutions of sexual violence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim explores our most intimate ties to others — the ties of kinship. Antigone's Claim explores the politics of kinship through a reading of the figure of Antigone. For Butler, Antigone represents a crisis of the Oedipal order of kinship, revealing the possibility of new forms of kinship itself. Butler presents a persuasive and moving argument for the necessity of changes in our conception and practice of kinship. However, her account of new kinship forms is less persuasive, failing to engage adequately with the sociality of kinship or to provide a radical model of its new forms. Butler argues that Antigone does not represent a feminist politics. However, Antigone's Claim suggests that, if we are to re-conceive the politics of kinship, then it is necessary to reread Antigone as a political figure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aim of this study was to estimate the contribution of deleterious mutations in the RAD51B, RAD51C, and RAD51D genes to invasive epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) in the population and in a screening trial of individuals at high risk of ovarian cancer., Patients and Methods: The coding sequence and splice site boundaries of the three RAD51 genes were sequenced and analyzed in germline DNA from a case-control study of 3,429 patients with invasive EOC and 2,772 controls as well as in 2,000 unaffected women who were BRCA1/BRCA2 negative from the United Kingdom Familial Ovarian Cancer Screening Study (UK&#95;FOCSS) after quality-control analysis., Results: In the case-control study, we identified predicted deleterious mutations in 28 EOC cases (0.82%) compared with three controls (0.11%; P < .001). Mutations in EOC cases were more frequent in RAD51C (14 occurrences, 0.41%) and RAD51D (12 occurrences, 0.35%) than in RAD51B (two occurrences, 0.06%). RAD51C mutations were associated with an odds ratio of 5.2 (95% CI, 1.1 to 24; P = .035), and RAD51D mutations conferred an odds ratio of 12 (95% CI, 1.5 to 90; P = .019). We identified 13 RAD51 mutations (0.65%) in unaffected UK&#95;FOCSS participants (RAD51C, n = 7; RAD51D, n = 5; and RAD51B, n = 1), which was a significantly greater rate than in controls (P < .001); furthermore, RAD51 mutation carriers were more likely than noncarriers to have a family history of ovarian cancer (P < .001)., Conclusion: These results confirm that RAD51C and RAD51D are moderate ovarian cancer susceptibility genes and suggest that they confer levels of risk of EOC that may warrant their use alongside BRCA1 and BRCA2 in routine clinical genetic testing., (© 2015 by American Society of Clinical Oncology.)