par Hebert-Dolbec, Marie-Laurence 
;Mégret, Frédéric;Scalia, Damien
Référence Ed. 1
Publication A Paraître, 2025-09-01
;Mégret, Frédéric;Scalia, Damien Référence Ed. 1
Publication A Paraître, 2025-09-01
Direction d'ouvrage
| Résumé : | 75 years after Nuremberg, what happened to the notion of mass trials that saw dozens of criminals – Nazis or Japanese before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East – prosecuted and judged together? Despite their shortcomings or even failures, their historical legacy persists. Given the chronic crisis faced by criminal justice, both domestic and international, what can we learn from these legacies? Would collective trials be possible and desirable today?The expression “mass trial” invokes different origins. One is the emphasis on class actions that bring together several victims allying themselves against a company, a State or, more rarely, one or a few individuals. In the criminal realm, “mass trials” are reminiscent of the ones held against the Italian mafia since the 1980s. What these criminal and civil variants have in common is a desire to aggregate judicial action for the sake of efficiency but also symbolic purposes. Mass trials make it possible to try individuals involved in a joint criminal enterprise or conspiracy, highlighting their relative guilt whilst minimising evidentiary and delay issues.Mass trials, however, are in tension with the liberal canon and its emphasis on individual responsibility. They are suggestive of earlier instances of, notably Soviet, “show trials.” It is worth recalling the broad criticism, notably by civil society, that met the trial of more than 800 military personnel following a mutiny in Bangladesh, or of nearly 500 people following the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, or against hundreds of Egyptian protesters in 2014. The political nature of such trials is invariably raised. No “mass trial” has been held internationally for international crimes since Nuremberg and Tokyo.Yet their relevance in mafia cases or, more recently, in the context of terrorism suggests that they are certainly not entirely beyond the pale. What can one make of that tension? Might collective trials have institutional, social and symbolic effects that transcend their weaknesses? For example, given the criticisms levelled at criminal justice in terms of its administration, costs, and length of proceedings, the benefits of collective trials may seem attractive: economies of scale, additional resources, shorter deadlines, increased exemplariness, etc. Mass trials have a symbolic potential that exceeds that of prosecutions based on the idea of individual responsibility, even though the collective dimension of international crimes is growingly recognised. Indeed, the fact that individual cases before contemporary international criminal tribunals have been joined suggests room for at least some measure of “collectivization” of criminal procedures. This is particularly the case against the background of a persistent criticism of international criminal justice’s individualism despite the fact that many mass crimes have evident collective dimensions.The editors’ central intuition is that the time is ripe to reconsider the legacy of mass trials and evaluate them with subtlety to understand whether they have merits beyond authoritarian systems. In order to do so, the proposed collection will investigate a range of experiments, both domestic and international, where individuals have been prosecuted collectively during the last 70 years. It will be the first to offer a multidisciplinary and cross-cutting analysis of mass trials and will examine the origin, challenges, and prospects of such trials. It will consider a series of case studies in its context but against the background of a common grid developed by the editors that will emphasise: (i) the reasons for resorting to mass trials in the first place, including choice of defendants; (ii) the challenges encountered, notably in terms of the right to a fair trial; (iii) the broader impact and legacy of such trials as criminal trials but also more broadly as symbolic historical, social and political moments.The book proposal has already given rise to a hybrid event where drafts of the chapters were discussed. It is based on that promising event and adjustments made since the present publication was suggested. We believe the Routledge International and Comparative Criminal Justice: International and Comparative Criminal Justice would be the best home for it, although we are open to alternative suggestions by Routledge. Our sense is that the collection’s opening to a variety of fields, the fact that we have a diverse set of young authors, and that the collection expands across domestic, international and comparative criminal law could be of interest and make it a good fit. |
