In just a few short years, the Khmer Rouge presided over one of the twentieth century's cruelest reigns of terror. Since its 1979 overthrow, there have been several attempts to hold the perpetrators ...accountable, from a People's Revolutionary Tribunal shortly afterward through the early 2000s Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.Extraordinary Justice offers a definitive account of the quest for justice in Cambodia that uses this history to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the interaction between law and politics in war crimes tribunals. Craig Etcheson, one of the world's foremost experts on the Cambodian genocide and its aftermath, draws on decades of experience to trace the evolution of transitional justice in the country from the late 1970s to the present. He considers how war crimes tribunals come into existence, how they operate and unfold, and what happens in their wake. Etcheson argues that the concepts of legality that hold sway in such tribunals should be understood in terms of their orientation toward politics, both in the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and generally. A magisterial chronicle of the inner workings of postconflict justice,Extraordinary Justice challenges understandings of the relationship between politics and the law, with important implications for the future of attempts to seek accountability for crimes against humanity.
What does it take to make a dictator answer for his crimes? Hissène
Habré, the former despot of Chad, had terrorized, tortured, and
killed on a horrific scale over eight bloody years in power-all
...while enjoying full American and Western support. After Habré's
overthrow, his victims and their supporters were determined to see
him held responsible for his atrocities. Their quest for justice
would be long, tense, and unnerving, but they would not back down.
To Catch a Dictator is a dramatic insider's account of the
hunt for Habré and his momentous trial. The human rights lawyer
Reed Brody recounts how he and an international team of
investigators, legal experts, and victims worked across three
continents to unearth evidence and witnesses, petition courts and
skeptical governments, and rally public opinion. They faced many
obstacles and constant threats. One of Brody's Chadian colleagues
was gravely injured in a bomb attack, and another had to seek
asylum in the United States. Habré fought back bitterly, drawing on
secret bank accounts and extensive political connections to
preserve his life of luxurious exile. Yet Brody and his allies
ultimately triumphed: Habré became the first former head of state
to be convicted of crimes against humanity in the courts of another
country. This fast-paced, suspenseful book shows that there is
nothing inevitable about the impunity that too often protects the
powerful and that even the worst tyrants can be brought to justice.
The book also features a foreword by Jacqueline Moudeïna, the lead
lawyer for Hissène Habré's victims, who received the Right
Livelihood Award (the "alternative Nobel Peace Prize") in 2011.
This book analyses torture, inhuman and degrading treatment towards migrants worldwide, integrating overviews from several contexts and disciplines. It highlights that today migrants’ mistreatment is ...a global phenomenon, a frequent element of the migratory experience (in countries of departure, of transit, of arrival), an intrinsic component of state policies, and an extreme form of that structural violence which is inherent to the contemporary war on migrants at the global level.
A World History of War Crimes provides a truly global history of war crimes and the involvement of the legal systems faced with these acts. Documenting the long historical arc traced by human efforts ...to limit warfare, from codes of war in antiquity designed to maintain a religiously conceived cosmic order to the gradual use in the modern age of the criminal trial as a means of enforcing universal norms, this book provides a comprehensive one-volume account of war and the laws that have governed conflict since the dawn of world civilizations.
Throughout his narrative, Michael Bryant locates the origin and evolution of the law of war in the interplay between different cultures. While showing that no single philosophical idea underlay the law of war in world history, this volume also proves that war in global civilization has rarely been an anarchic free-for-all. Rather, from its beginnings warfare has been subject to certain constraints defined by the unique needs and cosmological understandings of the cultures that produce them. Only in late modernity has law assumed its current international humanitarian form. The criminalization of war crimes in international courts today is only the most recent development of the ancient theme of constraining when and how war may be fought.
In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds ...genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.”
Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global ...examination of the form: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world emerging from widely divergent forms of political violence.
New perspectives on human rights prosecutions in various
regional contexts Human rights prosecutions are the most
prominent mechanisms that victims demand to obtain accountability.
Dealing with a ...legacy of gross human rights violations presents
opportunities to enhance the right to justice and promote a more
equal application of criminal law, a fundamental condition for a
more substantive democracy in societies. This book seeks to analyse
the impact, advances, and difficulties of prosecuting perpetrators
of mass atrocities at national and international levels. What role
does criminal justice play in redressing victims' wrongs,
guaranteeing the non-repetition of mass atrocities, and attempting
to overcome the damage caused by systematic human rights
violations? This volume addresses critical issues in the field of
human rights prosecution by drawing on the experiences of a variety
of post-conflict and authoritarian countries covering three world
regions. Contributing authors cover prosecutions in post-Nazi
Germany, post-Communist Romania, and transnational legal complaints
by victims of the Franco dictatorship, as well as domestic and
third-country prosecutions for human rights violations in the
pioneering South American countries of Argentina, Chile, Peru, and
Uruguay, prosecutions in Darfur and Kenya, and the work of the
International Criminal Court.
The Impact of Human Rights Prosecutions offers insights
into the difficulties human rights trials face in different
contexts and regions, and also illustrates the development of these
legal procedures over time. The volume will be of interest to human
rights scholars as well as legal practitioners, participants,
justice system actors, and policy makers.
Contributors: Aleida Assmann (University of Konstanz), Kristine
Avram (Philipps University of Marburg), Ulrike Capdepón (University
of Konstanz), Rosario Figari Layús (Justus Liebig University of
Giessen), Boris Hau (Diego Portales University), Iris Jave
(Pontifical Catholic University), Geoffrey Lugano (Kenyatta
University), Joachim J. Savelsberg (University of Minnesota),
Debbie Sharnak (Rowan University), Valeria Vegh Weis (Free
University of Berlin), Annette Weinke (Friedrich-Schiller
University Jena)
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed
Content).
This book examines what makes accountability for previous abuses more or less possible for transitional regimes to achieve. It closely examines the other vital goals of such regimes against which ...accountability is often balanced. The options available are not simply prosecution or pardon, as the most heated polemics of the debate over transitional justice suggest, but a range of options, from complete amnesty through truth commissions and lustration or purification to prosecutions. The question, then, is not whether accountability can be achieved, but what degree of accountability can be achieved by a given country.
Why do international criminal tribunals write histories of the origins and causes of armed conflicts? Richard Ashby Wilson conducted research with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and expert ...witnesses in three international criminal tribunals to understand how law and history are combined in the courtroom. Historical testimony is now an integral part of international trials, with prosecutors and defense teams using background testimony to pursue decidedly legal objectives. In the Slobodan Milošević trial, the prosecution sought to demonstrate special intent to commit genocide by reference to a long-standing animus, nurtured within a nationalist mindset. For their part, the defense called historical witnesses to undermine charges of superior responsibility, and to mitigate the sentence by representing crimes as reprisals. Although legal ways of knowing are distinct from those of history, the two are effectively combined in international trials in a way that challenges us to rethink the relationship between law and history.
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