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Top heavy: beyond the Global North and the justification for global administrative law

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Indian Journal of International Law

Abstract

Global administrative law scholars have argued that global administrative law’s principles and normativity can bring about legitimacy to global governance institutions, and subsequently benefit the people of the Global South. I challenge these recent arguments that suggest global administrative law has managed to incorporate the concerns of the Third World. I caution international lawyers’ attempts to theorize global governance as administration to fill the democracy gap within the global space. My arguments are premised on the history of domestic administrative law and its uses to facilitate the settler colonial project in places like North America. I first examine the two animating claims within global administrative law and then focus, based on taxonomies available within the current literature, on procedural administrative law. The procedural argument has been developed by American legal scholars who want to deploy their common law based notions of administrative law within the global space. Based on this analysis, I develop and deploy a case study from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as illustration of judicial review within an international criminal institution set up by the UN Security Council. In the final section, I challenge global administrative lawyers’ arguments that global administrative law can be a tool of emancipation for the people of the Global South based on the ICTR case study.

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Notes

  1. Sabino Cassese with Elisa D’Alterio, Introduction: The Development of Global Administrative Law, in, Sabino Cassese (ed) Research Handbook on Global Administrative Law (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2016) 1.

  2. Colleen Flood & Jennifer Dolling, An Introduction to Administrative Law: Some History and Few Signposts for a Twisted Path, in, Colleen Flood & Lorne Sossin (eds) Administrative Law in Context, 2nd edn (Emond Montgomery Publications, Toronto, 2013) 2–3.

  3. Sujith Xavier, False Western Universalism in Canadian Constitutionalism and Global Constitutionalism: The 1867 Canadian Constitution and the Legacies of the Residential Schools, in, Richard Albert et al (eds) The New Frontiers Constitutions (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2018) [forthcoming].

  4. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2015) 46; Sujith Xavier, Theorising Global Governance from Below? Learning from the Global South through Ethnographies and Critical Reflections, 32 Windsor YB Access to Justice (2016) 229.

  5. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, supra note 4, 46.

  6. Gus Van Harten et al, Administrative Law: Cases, Texts, and Materials, 6th edn (Emond Montgomery Publications, Toronto, 2010) 3.

  7. Lorenzo Casini, Global Administrative Law Scholarship, in, Sabino Cassese (ed) Research Handbook on Global Administrative Law (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2016) 554; Rene Fernando Urena Hernandez, Global Administrative Law and the Global South, in, Sabino Cassese (ed) Research Handbook on Global Administrative Law (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2016) 392.

  8. Chief Dan Miskokomon, Opening Welcome delivered at “Our Histories, Our Stories: Moving towards Reconciliation” organized by University of Windsor Faculty of Law, Wapole Island First Nation, 17 March 2016, [unpublished].

  9. WEB Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (OUP, New York, 2007) 16–32.

  10. Casini, supra note 7, 554.

  11. Richard B Stewart, US Administrative Law: A Model for Global Administrative Law? 68 L & Contemp Probs (2005) 63; Richard B Stewart, The Normative Dimensions and Performance of Global Administrative law, 13 Intl J Constitutional L (2015) 499; Benedict Kingsbury, Nico Krisch & Richard B Stewart, The Emergence of Global Administrative Law, 68 Law & Contemp Probs (2005) 15.

  12. Carol Harlow, Global Administrative Law: The Quest for Principles and Values, 17 Eur J Intl L (2006), 187, 190.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Susan Marks, Naming Global Administrative Law, 37 NYUJ Intl L & Pol (2005) 995, 995.

  15. Urena Hernandez, supra note 7, 392.

  16. Lorenzo Casini, States and Global Administrations in Context, in, Sabino Cassese et al (eds) Global Administrative Law: The Casebook (Institute for International Law and Justice, New York, 2013) 25.

  17. For example, Kingsbury, Krisch and Stewart suggest the following: ‘[…] we are also proposing that much of global governance can be understood and analyzed as administrative action […]’; Kingsbury et al, supra note 11, 17. Kingsbury and Donaldson have suggested the following in 2011: ‘The interactions and relationships among different administrative actors and their activities in global governance also increasingly attract demands for application of global administrative law standards’; Benedict Kingsbury & Megan Donaldson, Global Administrative Law, in, R Wolfrum (ed) The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, 12th edn (OUP, Oxford, 2011).

  18. Cassese with D’Alterio, supra note 1, 3.

  19. Ibid, 8–9.

  20. Casini, supra note 16, 560.

  21. See generally Cassese with D’Alterio, supra note 1.

  22. Stewart, supra note 11.

  23. Casini, supra note 20, 557.

  24. The characterization of the world-wide perspective is plainly orientalist; see, for example, the reference to Global Administrative Law’s Arabian nights; Casini, supra note 16, at 560; For more details on Orientalism, see Edward S Said, Orientalism (Random House, New York, 1979); BS Chimni, Co-option and Resistance: Two Faces of Global Administrative Law, 37 NYU J Intl L Politics (2005) 799–827.

  25. Casini states: ‘After 10 years, it must be recognized that many of the conditions listed by Chimni have actually been met, as demonstrated in this handbook’; Casini, supra note 16, 561.

  26. BS Chimni, International Law and World Order (CUP, Cambridge, 2017); BS Chimni, The Self, Modern Civilization, and International Law: Learning from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, 23 Eur J Intl L (2012) 1159; BS Chimni, The World of TWAIL: Introduction to the Special Issue, 3 Trade, L & Development (2011) 14; BS Chimni, Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto, 8 Intl Community L Rev (2006) 3.

  27. Cassese with D’Alterio, supra note 1, 10.

  28. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (OUP, Oxford, 1996).

  29. Kingsbury et al, supra note 11.

  30. Ibid, 27.

  31. Stewart, supra note 11, 64.

  32. Casini, supra note 16, 555.

  33. Kingsbury et al, supra note 11.

  34. Stewart, supra note 11, 499.

  35. Daniel Esty, Good Governance at the Supranational Scale: Globalizing Administrative Law, 115 Yale L J (2006) 1490.

  36. Benedict Kingsbury, The Concept of “Law” in Global Administrative Law, 20 Eur J Intl L (2009) 23, 27.

  37. Stewart, supra note 11, 65.

  38. Megan Fairlie, Rulemaking from the Bench: A Place for Minimalism at the ICTY, 39 Texas Intl LJ (2003) 257.

  39. Ibid.

  40. United Nations, United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Principles and Guidelines (United Nations Secretariat, New York, 2008) <http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/documents/capstone_eng.pdf>.

  41. Maximo Langer & Joseph W Doherty, Managerial Judging Goes International but Its Promise Remains Unfulfilled: An Empirical Assessment of the ICTY Reforms, 36 Yale J Intl L (2011) 241.

  42. Kingsbury et al, supra note 11, 17.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Stewart, supra note 11, 71–73.

  45. Ibid, 98.

  46. Ibid, 100.

  47. Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Adopted by United Nations Security Council on 1 July 1994 at its 3400th meeting (49th Sess), UNSC Res 935, UN Doc S/RES/935 (1994).

  48. Virginia Morris & Michael P Scharf, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Volume 1 (Transnational Publishers, New York, 1998), 63–64; Robert Cryer et al, An Introduction to International Criminal Law and Procedure (CUP, Cambridge, 2010), 139; Payam Akhavan, The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: The Politics and Pragmatics of Punishment. 90 Am J Intl L (1996) 501, 504.

  49. Letter from the UN Secretary-General Addressed to the President of the United Nations Security Council (Report of the UN Secretary-General), UN Doc S/1994/1125 (4 October 1994) [43].

  50. Statute, supra note 47.

  51. Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Adopted by the United Nations Security Council at its 3217th meeting (48th Sess), UNSC Res 827, UN Doc S/25704 (1993).

  52. Ibid, Arts 2–4.

  53. The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals assumed responsibilities for the ICTR’s residual functions, including rendering one of the final appeal decisions. United Nations Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, The ICTR in Brief <http://unictr.unmict.org/en/tribunal>.

  54. Roy Lee, The Rwanda Tribunal, 9 Leiden J Intl L (1996) 37, 43.

  55. Daryl A Mundis, New Mechanisms/or the Enforcement of International Humanitarian Law, 95 Am J Intl L (2001) 934; Langer & Doherty, supra note 41.

  56. Arsène Shalom Ntahobali was born in 1970 in Tel Aviv, Israel, and is a Rwandan national. He is the son of two incumbent Rwandan government ministers during the genocide (Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, Minister for the Family and Women’s Affairs, and Maurice Ntahobali, former President of the Rwandan National Assembly, Minister for Higher Education and Rector of the National University of Butare). The Trial Chamber convicted Ntahobal of committing, ordering, and aiding and abetting genocide, extermination and persecution as crimes against humanity, and violence to life, health and physical or mental well-being of persons as a serious violation of Article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions and of Additional Protocol II; Prosecutor v Arsène Shalom Ntahobali, ICTR-97-21-T, The President’s Decision on the Application by Arsène Shalom Ntahobali for Review of the Registrar’s Decision Pertaining to the Assignment of an Investigator (13 November 2002) (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda).

  57. Ibid.

  58. Ibid.

  59. Prosecutor v Arsène Shalom Ntahobali, ICTR-97-21-T, Directive on Assignment of Defence Counsel and the Rules of Procedure and Evidence (13 November 2002) (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda).

  60. Ibid (italics supplied).

  61. Dunsmuir v New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9, [2008] 1 SCR 190; David Dyzenhaus, The Politics of Deference: Judicial Review and Democracy, in, Michael Taggart (ed) The Province of Administrative Law (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 1997) 279.

  62. Kingsbury et al, supra note 11, 17.

  63. Ibid; Benedict Kingsbury, The Administrative Law Frontier in Global Governance, 99 Am Soc Intl L Proceedings (2005) 143; Kingsbury, supra note 36, 27.

  64. Sujith Xavier & Shanthi Senthe, Re-Igniting Critical Race in Canadian Legal Spaces: Introduction to the Special Symposium Issue of Contemporary Accounts of Racialization in Canada, 31 Windsor YB Access Justice (2014) 1.

  65. Jamie Benidickson, The Canadian Board of Railway Commissioners: Regulation, Policy and Legal Process at the Turn-of-the-Century, 36 McGill L J (1991) 1223.

  66. Xavier, supra note 3.

  67. Sherene Razack, When Space Becomes Race, in, Sherene Razack (ed) Race, Space and the Law (Between the Lines, Toronto, 2002) 1; Bonita Lawrence, Rewriting Histories of the Law: Colonization and Indigenous Resistance in Eastern Canada, in, Sherene Razack (ed) Race, Space and the Law (Between the Lines, Toronto, 2002) 21.

  68. Karl-Heinz Ladeur has argued that domestic administrative law (and respective institutions) do not generate legitimacy; Karl-Heinz Ladeur, The Emergence of Global Administrative Law and Transnational Regulation, 3 Transnational Legal Theory (2013) 243; Sujith Xavier, Theorising Global Governance Inside Out: A Response to Professor Ladeur, 3 Transnational Legal Theory (2013) 268.

  69. Constance Backhouse, What Is Access to Justice?, in, Julia Bass, WA Bogart & Frederick H Zemans (eds) Access to Justice for a New Century: The Way Forward (Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto, 2005) 119.

  70. Truth and Reconciliation Commission, supra note 4, 37.

  71. Usha Natarajan et al, Introduction: TWAIL – On Praxis and the Intellectual, 37 Third World Q (2016) 1946; James Gathii, TWAIL: A Brief History of its Origins, Its Decentralized Network, and a Tentative Bibliography, 3 Trade, L & Development (2011) 26.

  72. Antony Anghie & BS Chimni, Third World Approaches to International and Individuals Responsibility in Internal Conflicts, 2 Chinese J Intl L (2003) 71; George Galindo, Splitting TWAIL, 33 Windsor YB Access Justice (2016) 37.

  73. Asad Kiyani, John Reynolds & Sujith Xavier, Third World Approaches to International Criminal Law, 14 J Intl Crim Justice (2016) 915; John Reynolds & Sujith Xavier, The Dark Corners of the World: International Criminal Justice and the Global South, 14 J Intl Crim Justice (2016) 959.

  74. Xavier, supra note 4, 244.

  75. Obiora C Okafor, Critical Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL): Theory, Methodology, or Both? 10 Intl Community L Rev (2010) 37.

  76. Makau Mutua, What Is TWAIL?, 94 American Society Intl L Proceedings (2000) 31; Gathii, supra note 71; Anghie & Chimni, supra note 72; Xavier, supra note 4.

  77. Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (CUP, Cambridge, 2004) 4.

  78. Ibid.

  79. Ibid.

  80. Natarajan et al, supra note 71.

  81. Chimni, supra note 26.

  82. Stephanie Black, Life and Debt, <http://www.lifeanddebt.org/>.

  83. Anghie, supra note 77, 17.

  84. Gathii, supra note 71.

  85. Anghie, supra note 77.

  86. Gathii, supra note 71.

  87. Christoph Safferling, International Criminal Procedure (OUP, Oxford, 2012) 25.

  88. Nancy A Combs, Fact-Finding without Facts: The Uncertain Evidentiary Foundations of International Criminal Convictions (CUP, Cambridge, 2010); Xavier, supra note 68.

  89. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killer (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002) 3–18, 41–102, 185–233.

  90. BS Chimni, International Institutions Today: An Imperial Global State in the Making, 15 Eur J Intl L (2004) 1.

  91. Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United States (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009) 21.

  92. Xavier, supra note 68.

  93. Stewart, supra note 22, 500.

  94. Xavier, supra note 4.

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  1. Faculty of Law, University of Windsor, Room, 2113, Windsor, Canada

    Sujith Xavier

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Correspondence to Sujith Xavier.

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I would like to extend my sincerest appreciation to my doctoral committee (Peer Zumbansen, Ruth Buchanan and Bruce Broomhall) for their advice and generosity. I owe a debt of gratitude to Antony Anghie, Nergis Canefe and Obiora Okafor for their invaluable comments and suggestions in course of my doctoral exam. I am grateful to Kristen Thomasen for the thoughtful comments. I am thankful to Cheyenne Cunningham-Arnold and Samantha Hale for the research assistance. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and IJIL editors for their help.

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Xavier, S. Top heavy: beyond the Global North and the justification for global administrative law. Indian Journal of International Law 57, 337–356 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40901-018-0079-6

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