Researcher Spotlight: Natalie Hodgson

Natalie's research interests span criminology, criminal justice, and international criminal law. She has a particular focus on 'state crime', studying the harmful practices of states and how civil society uses law to challenge and resist those harms.

Natalie's research explores the expressive dimensions of law, particularly international criminal law, and the strategic use of "Article 15 communications", where an individual or organisation writes to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to provide the Prosecutor with information on alleged crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court. In 2021, her article 'International Criminal Law and Civil Society Resistance to Offshore Detention' was awarded the Australian Human Rights Journal's Andrea Durbach Prize. More recently, inspired by her time living and working in England, she has started researching comparative approaches to judge-alone trials in common law jurisdictions.

What project are you working on that excites you?

I'm currently working on a book which uses Australia's offshore processing of asylum seekers as a case study to explore the concept of 'criminalisation' in international criminal law. The book begins by considering whether aspects of Australia's offshore processing policy constituted crimes against humanity, before proceeding to critically consider the legal and political barriers that limit the ability and willingness of institutions such as the International Criminal Court to take action to criminalise Global North actors. Finally, the book explores how civil society leveraged the language of international criminal law extralegally to label offshore processing as illegitimate and generate censure against the state, which I argue is a form of sociological criminalisation. I conclude that, in responding to the state crimes of the Global North, the language of international criminal law might offer more potential for resistance than the institutions of international criminal law.
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The aim of the book is to draw together theories from criminal law, international law, and the criminological field of state crime. I'm finding it a bit challenging at the moment, but I hope that it will be a useful contribution in thinking about how criminalisation might be understood in different ways at the international level.
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What do you hope to achieve with your research/impact & engagement in the next year?

At the start of 2025, England and Wales announced a review of its criminal courts. One of the issues the review was particularly interested in was the possibility of judge-alone trials for indictable offences. Together with a colleague from the University of Nottingham, Dr Matt Thomason, we authored a submission exploring the use of judge-alone trials in a number of common law jurisdictions - including NSW, the ACT, and South Australia, as well as New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, and Northern Ireland. We were pleased to see that the Review's report reflected a number of the arguments we made, including about efficiency, fairness, and what we do and do not know about judge-alone trials.
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After several years researching primarily in international criminal law, I've really enjoyed doing something that is more focused on domestic criminal law. I'm hoping that I'll be able to continue this work into the new year.
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What research/impact & engagement achievement are you most proud of and why?

Every so often, I get an email from an academic or student about my article 'Gender Justice or Gendered Justice? Female Defendants in International Criminal Tribunals'. This was the first article I ever wrote (it was actually based off my Criminology Honours thesis that I completed as an undergraduate at UNSW) and it remains one of my favourite articles, so it's always nice to hear that other people have enjoyed reading it too.