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Markup and Metadata in International Criminal Law
Lowe, Will; Bekou, Olympia ( University of Nottingham)
This paper describes the construction of a database of national implementing legislation of the Rome Statute. The database applies a metadata scheme for international criminal law to legal texts from multiple countries, allowing comparative legal and socio-legal analysis at the paragraph level. In addition to marked up legal texts the database contains other materials for legal and international political context. The aim is to provide a more fully-connected dataset for comparative research in international law and politics, whilst also investigating metadata and markup issues specific to legal texts.
Background: The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established in 1998. Under its statute it has jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. States that ratify the Rome Statute are under an obligation to incorporate the ICC cooperation regime into domestic law and are encouraged, since the ICC is complementary to national courts, to adopt legislation allowing them to prosecute nationally the crimes falling under the ICC's jurisdiction. Aside from these legal complexities there is also a political aspect to the database; since the birth of the ICC, the United States has pursued bilateral immunity agreements ensuring that its personnel will not be affected by ICC actions, creating a complex set of international obligations for states.
These interlocking structures present formidable data representation challenges. Legal systems differ significantly, e.g. between common law, civil law, and mixed systems, and individual states differ in their understanding of their obligations to the ICC regime, particularly with respect to the scope of their national legal system as regards their obligations under the ICC regime. For the database to provide an effective comparative view of this aspect of international law, these differences must be reflected in an encompassing search / metadata scheme.
The database project is a joint effort between the Methods and Data Institute and the Human Rights Law Centre at the University of Nottingham. It forms part of the ICC's own Legal Tools Project. The project began when the first author a specialist in quantitative methods from the Methods and Data Institute with commercial experience in ontology and metadata management, was approached by the Human Rights Law Centre to systematize an existing collection of national implementations collected during PhD work by the second author, a international lawyer and expert on the ICC. The project was thus from the beginning not only cross-disciplinary - between political science and international law - but also, with the involvement of the ICC, bridged the theory / practice divide.
During the course of the project the technical and infrastructural challenges to bringing standard knowledge management methods to bear on the study and practice of international law became acutely obvious, in part because of unfamiliarity with standard tools, but also because of the paucity of metadata schemes available in this area.
The paper therefore takes the form of a case study, describing the course of our metadata construction process, the transfer of technical understanding regarding data representation and search to a legal context and the corresponding process of education in legal concepts, the current state of the project, and the lessons for similar e-social-science exercises.
