The International Criminal Court and African 'Victimhood'

Zusammenfassung

---

With this in mind, I would like to focus on the particular challenge of realizing justice in Africa for victims of international crime vis-à-vis the increasing orbit of intervention by the International Criminal Court (ICC), promise of the African Court and African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, and winding down processes of the international tribunals/ special courts for Rwanda and Sierra Leone, with a view toward suggesting avenues of research, and reflection, for what are in all estimations the world's most pressing crises. [...] proposals for integrating residual functions of the ICTR and SCSL (with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) are in the works, which include transferring these functions to the ICC.

Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes

Auszug

---

The International Criminal Court and African 'Victimhood'

IT would be commonplace, to say the least, to call recent international efforts to rein in authors of some of the worst crimes known to man as the inklings of some 'brave new world'. So I won't, I promise. But then again - shall we say - our recent efforts to subject characters the likes of Milosevic and Karadzic, Bagosora, Bemba, Taylor and al-Bashir, if not Tojo, Goring, 'Comrade Duch' and that 'murderers' row' we call the Khmer Rouge, to some evolving consensus of rights and justice is something that would shock the equilibrium of Huxley and Orwell. So even if one can be forgiven for calling history's first germinations of an effective system of global justice as 'brave', if not 'new', we can certainly see ours as a qualified utopia of sorts.

I say 'qualified' here because the challenge posed by 'victims' or 'survivors of atrocity' soberly resides in any calculus of international justice. And yet how we are to bring justice to victims and their families, on the ground, in the remotest regions of the developing world, is a concern that will command the fullest attention of the international community through this century. With this in mind, I would like to focus on the particular challenge of realizing justice in Africa for victims of international crime vis-à-vis the increasing orbit o...

Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes

---