Research Student
Working toward a PhD in Laws, expected 2024
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Mr. Mustakim Rahman is a PhD researcher in the Law Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prior to pursuing his doctoral studies, he served as an assistant professor and lecturer at Notre Dame University Bangladesh from 2016 to 2020. In 2019, he was honoured with the Marburg International Doctorate Travel Scholarship and the CICOPS Research Fellowship, which provided him with opportunities to collaborate with esteemed academics at the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, and the University of Pavia, Italy. Before joining Notre Dame University, Mr. Rahman worked as a research assistant at the Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs. He holds LL.M. (Public International Law, 2014) and LL.B. (Hons, 2012) degrees from Nottingham Trent University, UK, and a Foundation Degree in Arts (2010) from New College Nottingham, where he received the Best International Student Award. During his studies in England, he worked as a General Adviser at the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum (NNRF).
Towards an Analytical Framework for Prosecuting Temporally Distant Atrocity Crimes: Equitable Justice for Old Offences in Light of New Realties, co-supervised by Professors Gregory GORDON and Ryan MITCHELL.
I am interested in international criminal law and procedure, including topics touching on the normative and architectural aspects of local, hybrid, and transnational tribunals. With my thesis, I plan to investigate the range of empirical circumstances giving rise to tribunals adjudicating international crimes or related crimes that are several decades old, such as those in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Senegal. What are the social, legal, and political factors giving rise to such institutions? In light of those factors, and given the long temporal gap between crime commission and prosecution, what normative and policy considerations should be considered in applying or not applying statutory limitations? Should procedural fairness trump the fight against the culture of impunity when too much time has lapsed? If so, what underlies the procedural fairness calculus vis-à-vis the age of the case? To the extent the offences charged are only quasi-international (or are domestic crimes arising out of the same nucleus of operative facts as international crimes), should those offences be treated differently? The 1968 Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity gives us some insights into these questions. But that treaty has been underexamined, and its scope is limited. My thesis seeks to provide a global framework that can be consulted to analyze the more marginal cases and the non-core crimes.
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