2026/02/18 by Marcelo Henrique Pereira Marques · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Cambodian History and Society #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics #International Law and Human Rights
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/14623528.2026.2629175
openalex publication_date 2026/02/18 · openalex created_date 2026/02/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This article examines how universal jurisdiction (UJ) over genocide operates across national jurisdictions following an analysis of prosecutions and institutional designs. Building a comprehensive dataset of forty-two UJ genocide proceedings (1961–2025), it traces applications’ growth, outcomes, and the geography of commission and prosecution. Following this empirical base, the article develops a tiering typology of institutional designs – Restrictivists, In-betweeners, Practice-gated Permissives, and Expansionists – based on the UJ requirements – nexus design, double criminality, subsidiarity, temporal rules, and prosecutorial procedure and practice. A focused comparison of France and Germany, the two most expansionist’s jurisdictions, reveals contrasting UJ designs: France’s expansionism by exception, notably concentrated on Rwandan genocidaires versus Germany’s expansionist by design, spanning multiple conflicts. Across systems, procedural design choices (nexus requirements, subsidiarity, and imprescriptibly), specialized prosecution teams, and NGOs, emerge as key determinants of case movement. The analysis shows that UJ has been institutionalized through domestic law and practice, functioning as an evolving transnational justice mechanism that can fill accountability gaps when territorial or national fora falter. The contribution is empirical, analytical, and substantive: a disaggregated and comprehensive map of UJ-based genocide prosecutions, a replicable framework for evaluating which legal-institutional levers most effectively enable (or constrain) the pursuit of genocide cases, and an in-depth comparison of two viable, yet different, routes to sustained genocide prosecutions.