Single Review on past events

"A psychological approach to international criminal justice. Improving decision-making in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court"

Abstract

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has recently been at the center of fierce criticism about its ability to fulfil its role to investigate and prosecute the most heinous international crimes. In this project, we aim to help counter the criticisms by exploring an optimal decision-making model within the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP). After considering criminological and psychological literature, cultural aspects, and the legal framework in the context of international criminal law we have identified factors that hinder decision-making during the investigation phase. Specifically, we have attempted to map the role of bounded rationality and cognitive bias within the investigation phase and thereby address the first cause of decision error in dynamic decision-making environments. Our future plans to explore how data-driven statistical approaches can assist the development of a theoretical, evidence-based model of optimal decision-making will be discussed. 

Anna Sagana, Assistant Professor in Legal and Criminological Psychology at Maastricht University (the Netherlands), works in the field of decision-making in relation to judicial decision and eyewitness identifications. She has published numerous articles on eyewitness identification and cognitive biases in legal domain in a range of legal psychology journals including Behavioural Science and the Law, Applied Cognitive Psychology, and Legal and Criminological Psychology. Recently Dr. Sagana edited a special issue on the “Psychology or Forensic Evidence” for the Zeitschrift fur Psychologie.

Gabriele Chlevickaite is a Criminologist and PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (the Netherlands). She has been working at the Investigations Division of the ICC OTP in the capacity of assistant analyst before she was awarded the NWO Research Talent grant and moved to Vrije Universiteit for her PhD. Her current work focuses on the credibility and reliability assessments of insider witnesses in international criminal courts and tribunals.

Dave van Toor is an Assistant Professor of Criminal (Procedural) Law at Utrecht University (the Netherlands), and holds a research position at the department of Criminology and (Comparative) Criminal Law at Bielefeld University (Germany). His research touches upon legal judgment and decision-making and bridging the gap between psychology and the law. He has published in a wide range of international, Dutch and German legal journals.

Nikolaos Aletras is a Lecturer in Natural Language Processing in the Computer Science Department of the University of Sheffield (UK), co-affiliated with the Machine Learning (ML) group. His research is in applying statistical methods for detecting and interpreting the underlying topics in large volumes of text data and develops text analysis methods to solve problems in other scientific areas such as social and legal science. Dr. Aletras has gained industrial experience working as a scientist at Amazon (Amazon Research Cambridge and Alexa) and he was a research associate at UCL, Department of Computer Science, Media Futures Group.