Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Hissene Habre, Augusto Pinochet, Charles Taylor. There have never been more political leaders in the dock, or, under the shadow of its threat. Of what significance ...are these contemporary instances of transitional justice? This article will use the trials of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein as an occasion for revisiting and extending my ongoing project of tracing a genealogy of transitional justice.
It is a testimony to how much international criminal justice has become an established feature of the international system that we have now reached a stage where the issue is typically no longer ...'whether' persons suspected of international crimes should be judged, but the finer points of 'how' they should be judged. This points to a thorough "normalization" of international criminal justice, a far cry from the discipline's early epic days where the case for the very idea of criminal repression had to be made incessantly.
Former heads of state on trial Wladimiroff, Mikhail
Cornell international law journal,
09/2005, Volume:
38, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
When I arrived at the Detroit Airport on my way to the symposium "Milosevic and Hussein on Trial" at Cornell, I joined the line as all other visitors, shuffling on to the counter and showing my Dutch ...passport to the Homeland Security officer. He checked it, as well as my flight tickets, noticed the connecting flight to Syracuse, and asked me the purpose of my visit. I told him I was on my way to a symposium at Cornell. "About what?" he asked, and-almost routinely-I responded: "On international criminal law." Then he took me by surprise by asking, "Are you for or against it?" The question puzzled me for a moment: should I interpret it as the way the ordinary American perceives the issue, or should I simply ignore my own perception of the situation? I decided to answer, "It is just another area of law, isn't it? It doesn't matter were you live." The officer seemed satisfied, I passed through, and arrived in the United States.
On September 30, 1992, I attended a fateful meeting at the Intercontinental Hotel in Zagreb, Croatia. A recent graduate of law school, I felt privileged to be part of a high-level diplomatic mission ...entrusted with investigating humanitarian law violations in the former Yugoslavia. We had been dispatched by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in response to the horrific accounts of "ethnic cleansing" that had shattered Europe's post-Cold War euphoria. Like many others, I was outraged by the radical evil unfolding in the Balkans, and in my youthful idealism I wanted justice to be done. Yet, as Ambassador Hans Corell of Sweden opened the meeting, there was a feeling that we were unwitting participants in a political farce. The specter of genocide once again haunted Europe and there was no resolve to intervene. If anything, Slobodan Milosevic was considered indispensable to stability in the Balkans and appeasement of his regime was the prevailing policy. Against this backdrop I felt somehow that our mission was merely a pretension of concern.
When Saddam Hussein assumes his place in the defendant's dock in Iraq for his trial later this year or early in 2006, for this second political trial of the century he will be following in the ...pathway of Slobodan Milosevic on trial for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. For both leaders on trial, their personalities and political behavior will play key roles in determining their conduct in the courtroom and influence the outcome of the trials.
PDF