ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two key issues which have arisen as regards the international criminal tribunals’ interpretation of the right to a fair trial, namely the parties to whom rights at trial attach, and the right to trial without undue delay. The chapter argues that the tribunals’ extension of fair trial rights to other actors at trial, but particularly the prosecutor, is unnecessary and unhelpful. It also reveals that the defendant’s right to a speedy trial has been used as a bar to the exercise of other rights in some circumstances, whilst in other situations a breach of the right to trial without undue delay has proven almost impossible to assert. These issues ought not to be viewed in a vacuum, but rather as symptomatic of a wider deficiency in international criminal law. They illustrate the piecemeal fashion in which questions on the fundaments of fairness in international criminal law have been answered, the lack of an overarching theory guiding the procedural fairness of trials, and international criminal law’s resultant failure to serve a standard-setting function for the fairness of trials.2
