Introduction: National Prosecutions of International Crimes: Sentencing Practices and (Negotiated) Punishments

Funding

The articles included in this special issue can be seen as one of the first steps towards filling these major gaps. They all focus on domestic prosecutions of international crimes, and in particular punishment and sentencing. They all offer empirically based analyses written by scholars intimately familiar with the local context in which the international or atrocity crimes took place and where the prosecutions were conducted. The special issue is the result of an expert meeting conducted at the Centre for International Criminal Justice (cicj) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in June 2017, which was financially supported by the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (nwo),8 the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (nscr) and the Amsterdam Law and Behaviour Institute (A-lab). The expert meeting brought together scholars from around the globe, who were asked to discuss sentencing practices and the legal, theoretical and practical challenges of punishing perpetrators of international crimes in domestic courts. This issue includes six original, empirically based case studies representing jurisdictions with