Earlier this summer, a US District Court issued sentences in a international maritime piracy case that involved four US victims. The defendant was not an actual pirate but a ransom negotiator for the piracy financiers.
(Christian Science Monitor)
The case illustrates a key difference between domestic courts and international tribunals when exercising jurisdiction over international crimes. To my knowledge, no international tribunal has ever issued consecutive sentences. As I recently blogged, the International Criminal Court issued three sentences of 12, 13, and 14 years in its first concluded trial against Thomas Lubanga. However that Tribunal ordered the sentences to be served concurrently. They could have issued the sentences to run concurrently up to a maximum of 30 years. Article 78(3) of the Rome Statute pertains to sentencing and it provides:
It has always struck me as curious that the drafters of the Rome Statute would want to impose sentencing limits of judges in cases as serious as genocide and other mass atrocity cases.
A sentence of consecutive life sentences such as issued in Shibin is obviously symbolic but nonetheless a powerful statement about the nature of the crime. Take for example the Dos Erres Massacre case in El Salvador in which four soldiers were convicted of murdering 201 people and sentenced to 6060 years. As the BBC noted
The sentence is largely symbolic as the maximum actual [maximum] term is 50 years …
The cases at international tribunals often deal with much more egregious crimes – the Ituri region in Lubanga saw 60,000 persons killed. And yet tribunal judges have been unwilling to issue symbolic sentences that reflect the fact that mass atrocities are not ordinary crimes and should not involve ordinary sentences.
