Preface to the First Book

• Author: Joseph Rikhof
• Pages: 39-42

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Preface

   

The book you see before you has been in the making for over twenty

years. The issue of criminality, especially in the international sphere,

has been of great interest to me for a long time, both professionally as

well as academically. As a government lawyer for the Department of

Justice of Canada, I have been fortunate to have had a front seat during

major developments in the areas of international criminal law as well

as exclusion law. I have also been fortunate in the opportunity to move

back and forth between these two disciplines: as counsel for the Crimes

against Humanity and War Crimes Section when it was established

in ; as in-house counsel for the new War Crimes Section of the

Department of Citizenship and Immigration in ; and then, f‌inally,

returning as senior counsel to the Department of Justice in . In that

last capacity, the two strands of interest were brought together under

the title “manager of the law,” meaning that I could provide legal advice

in both international criminal law and exclusion law.

While international criminal law has been developed mostly by

international institutions in the last two decades, this is changing in

that national jurisdictions are now also starting to apply international

law concepts to domestic processes. This national approach with

respect to international crimes is even more apparent in exclusion law

as national tribunals and courts relied for the most part on their innate

sense of justice and logic to give meaning to terms used in the 

Refugee Convention, where the notion of exclusion is embedded. These

national developments are gaining importance as the interplay between

international manifestations of both international criminal law and