Rehabilitating enemies of mankind: An Exploration of the Concept of Rehabilitation as a Sentencing Aim at the icty and the icc

Abstract

This article explores the concept of rehabilitation as a sentencing aim at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (icty) and the International Criminal Court (icc). All sentencing decisions and early release decisions, as well as the positive law of the icty and the icc were examined alongside relevant scholarly literature to explore the institutions’ conceptualisation of rehabilitation. The comparative qualitative analysis showed that there is considerable incoherence in the conceptualisation of rehabilitation, both within the icty, as well as between the icty and the icc. At the icty, rehabilitation holds a negligible role within the judgments, yet, paradoxically, evidence of successful rehabilitation is a requirement for early release. The comparison between the sentencing decisions and early release decisions of the icty with those of the icc demonstrated that the focus has shifted from rehabilitating individual perpetrators to reconciling communities.