Pursuing Justice For Mass Atrocities

"Pursuing Justice for Mass Atrocities: A Handbook for Victim Groups" is an educational resource for victim groups that want to influence or participate in the justice process for mass atrocities. It presents a range of tools that victim groups can use, from building a victim-centered coalition and developing a strategic communications plan to engaging with policy makers and decision makers and using the law to obtain justice.

What happens when the international community simultaneously pursues peace and justice in response to ongoing conflicts? What are the effects of interventions by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the wars in which the institution intervenes? Is holding perpetrators of mass atrocities accountable a help or hindrance to conflict resolution? This book offers an in-depth examination of the effects of interventions by the ICC on peace, justice and conflict processes. The 'peace versus justice' debate, wherein it is argued that the ICC has either positive or negative effects on 'peace', has spawned in response to the Court's propensity to intervene in conflicts as they still rage. This book is a response to, and a critical engagement with, this debate. Building on theoretical and analytical insights from the fields of conflict and peace studies, conflict resolution, and negotiation theory, the book develops a novel analytical framework to study the Court's effects on peace, justice, and conflict processes. This framework is applied to two cases: Libya and northern Uganda. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the core of the book examines the empirical effects of the ICC on each case. The book also examines why the ICC has the effects that it does, delineating the relationship between the interests of states that refer situations to the Court and the ICC's institutional interests, arguing that the negotiation of these interests determines which side of a conflict the ICC targets and thus its effects on peace, justice, and conflict processes. While the effects of the ICC's interventions are ultimately and inevitably mixed, the book makes a unique contribution to the empirical record on ICC interventions and presents a novel and sophisticated means of studying, analyzing, and understanding the effects of the Court's interventions in Libya, northern Uganda - and beyond.

Transitional Justice in Rwanda: Accountability for Atrocity comprehensively analyzes the full range of the transitional justice processes undertaken for the Rwandan genocide. Drawing on the author’s extensive professional experience as the principal justice policy maker and the leading law enforcement officer in Rwanda from 1996-2003, the book provides an in-depth analysis of the social, political and legal challenges faced by Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide and the aspirations and legacy of transitional justice. The book explores the role played by the accountability processes not just in pursuing accountability but also in shaping the reconstruction of Rwanda’s institutions of democratic governance and political reconciliation. Central to this exploration will be the examination of whether or not transitional justice in Rwanda has contributed to a foundational rule of law reform process. While recognizing the necessity of pursuing accountability for mass atrocity, the book argues that a maximal approach to accountability for genocide may undermine the promotion of core objectives of transitional justice. Taking on one of the key questions facing practitioners and scholars of transitional justice today, the book suggests that the pursuit of mass accountability, particularly where socio-economic resources and legal capacity is limited, may destabilize the process of rule of law reform, endangering core human rights norms. Moreover, the book suggests that pursuing a strategy of mass accountability may undermine the process of democratic transition, particularly in a context where impunity for crimes committed by the victors of armed conflicts persists. Highlighting the ongoing democratic deficit in Rwanda and resulting political instability in the Great Lakes region, the book argues that the effectiveness of transitional justice ultimately hinges on the nature and success of political transition.

Providing a refreshing take on transitional justice, this second edition Research Handbook brings together an expanse of scholarly expertise to reconsider how societies deal with gross human rights violations, structural injustices and mass violence. Contextualised by historical developments, it covers a diverse range of concepts, actors and mechanisms of transitional justice, while shedding light on new and emerging areas in the field.

The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.

Contemporary practice of universal jurisdiction : uneven developments -- Beyond the famous cases : universal jurisdiction and the problem of legitimacy -- Universal jurisdiction : problems and prospects of externalizing justice -- Non-criminal justice, new actors : non-state actors and corporations under the -- Alien tort claims act -- Externalization reversed : the hybrid experiment in East Timor -- Externalization reversed : the hybrid experiment in Sierra Leone.

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.