CYIL vol. 15 (2024)

AVITUS A. AGBOR prevailed at the time, requiring that a direct causal link to be established between his speeches and every atrocity would be unfeasible: rather, a comprehensive picture of the planning, preparation and execution would require that the prosecution highlights the publications in that context and the atrocities that followed. As the Charter of the IMT, Nuremberg, would lay the legal architecture for subsequent tribunals to consider the criminalisation of instigation as a mode of participation, its construction would, unfortunately, be loaded with some novel technicality: that it contributed substantially to the commission of the crime over which the tribunal has jurisdiction. Added to that complexity in prosecuting hate speech as a mode of participation (instigation), were the fact that the same hate speech may qualify as the inchoate crime of direct and public incitement to commit genocide. As it happened in a few cases, philosophical debates on the contents of and limits to the right to free speech were evoked: these philosophical and conceptual debates are identified and discussed in the following paper.

206