Leslie Vinjamuri

Prosecuting war criminals: the case for decentralisation

Michelle Sieff is a Senior Research Associate on African Affairs at the Eurasia Group, a consulting company in New York City. Leslie Vinjamuri is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for International Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science, and an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, Washington, DC.1

Special forum on Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics

In a dialogue discussing issues of the relation between empirical and normative theory, four contributors comment upon the edited volume by Richard Price, Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics , and Richard Price responds. The contributions principally revolve around the following themes: (1) whether a division of labor between normative and empirical theory can or should be overcome, which in turn presupposes notions of (2) just what constitutes normative and empirical international relations as such; and (3) the ethics of constructivism itself, including what if anything is distinctive about how constructivism might respond to the question of ‘how we should act’.

Human Rights and Human Welfare: Looking for a “Dark Side” to International Human Rights Law

International human rights law has attracted a barrage of criticism over the past decade or more. One critique views international human rights law as useless and argues that it has not managed to improve enjoyment of the rights it has set out to protect. Another critique goes further: it blames the legalization of international human rights norms for a series of negative outcomes, from the neglect of development to a crisis in the realization of social rights. Some even suggest that international legal obligations are to blame for the channeling of repressive tactics from areas that are clearly foreclosed by law to gray areas where rules are less clear. We argue that these claims are often illogical and are typically unsupported by any evidence. Such arguments are themselves potentially dangerous if they sow unfounded doubt over the value of the international human rights system.

Human Rights Futures

For the first time in one collected volume, mainstream and critical human rights scholars together examine the empirical and normative debates around the future of human rights. They ask what makes human rights effective, what strategies will enhance the chances of compliance, what blocks progress, and whether the hope for human rights is entirely misplaced in a rapidly transforming world. Human Rights Futures sees the world as at a crucial juncture. The project for globalizing rights will either continue to be embedded or will fall backward into a maelstrom of nationalist backlash, religious resurgence and faltering Western power. Each chapter talks directly to the others in an interactive dialogue, providing a theoretical and methodological framework for a clear research agenda for the next decade. Scholars, graduate students and practitioners of political science, history, sociology, law and development will find much to both challenge and provoke them in this innovative book.

Human Rights on the Road to Nowhere

For most of recorded human history, people have been concerned about what constitutes freedom, equality, fairness, and justice. In different eras, and different places, these ideas have had radically different answers. Any attempt to produce a grand historical account of what constitutes justice, for example, would have to deal with the many ways in which treating people justly has involved killing, torturing, enslaving, ostracizing, or exiling them. Human equality and human freedom were similarly dependent on either your identity or on any sins or crimes against gods or the social body for which you were deemed responsible. To talk of human rights as transhistorical phenomena only works, as a result, if we see them asmoral (not empirical) claims, arguing that people have always had these rights in principle, whatever the reality. We have not created them; we have simply discovered them. Our forebears were either unenlightened or morally wrong. In this way, talk of empirical human rights cannot draw sustenance from the past except through reverse engineering. Some people historically may have held rights-like ideas, but “human rights” – rights that attach to all individuals on account of their simply being human – are one of our era’s distinctive ideologies about right, fair and just treatment. They are reflective of a – perhaps the – defining feature of Western-style modernity: the emergence of the idea of rational, autonomous, self-governing individuals as the primary building blocks of political and social life and as the fundamental source of moral value. This shift has only happened in a serious way in the last two hundred or so years. Because classic human rights are, in this sense, individual entitlements held against each other and against collective authorities, the emphasis in most arguments for rights is on the primacy of personal choice in terms of beliefs, commitments, lifestyle, and identity. This is captured in the idea of rights as trumps: winning cards in the game of life that individuals can play against any attempt to regulate, prohibit, mistreat, or disadvantage them in the name of broader social or political

The distance promise of a negotiated justice

A basic dilemma for political transitions and peace talks, whether to hold perpetrators of mass atrocities accountable or to negotiate a deal, has once again become the source of intense political controversy. Originally seen as containing a pathbreaking and innovative solution to this problem, a peace deal designed to bring an end to the war between the government of Colombia and the FARC was instrumentalized by former President Uribe to mobilize popular support and was struck down when it was put to the public for a vote. Elsewhere, political realities have impinged on efforts to hold trials, provoking a backlash by powerful individuals determined to spoil the peace rather than sacrifice their personal freedom. But when international criminal tribunals fail to prosecute powerful spoilers, they have been condemned for their hypocrisy or charged with being selective in their pursuit of justice. One measure to address the basic accountability dilemma would be to accept transitional justice compromises that hold a reasonable prospect of delivering peace and that have a strong base of support among those individuals and communities most affected by political violence. Transitional justice strategies should be guided by a do-no-harm principle.

Review of Kathryn Sikkink's The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics

The Justice Cascade is an ambitious book that traces the global diffusion of human rights trials over three decades. Its first claim, that justice is widely embraced and increasingly legitimate, is bold and masks intense contestation that the justice process has generated in Cambodia, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Kosovo, Serbia, and beyond. Its second claim, that “prosecutions may deter human rights violations,” is more modest but based on an even more ambitious project. Together with coauthor Hun Joon Kim, Sikkink evaluates the impact of human rights trials on improvements in human rights. Many who read The Justice Cascade will share its enthusiasm for human rights trials. The evidence presented in The Justice Cascade, though, is unlikely to service the trope that international tribunals deter atrocities. Some leading human rights advocates have become wary of relying on the still prominent claim that trials and tribunals deter atrocities to justify war crime trials. Juan Mendez (2008), who figures prominently in Sikkink’s story, argues for a renewed focus on trials for their role in establishing guilt and innocence.1 Scholars, students, and practitioners who read The Justice Cascade will not find clear evidence of deterrence, but they will find plenty to debate. Those familiar with Sikkink’s writings will recognize The Justice Cascade. In its careful tracing of the work of individuals, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and networks to embed ideas in political life, it resembles the strength of Sikkink’s earlier work. Empirically, though, this book goes much further. Qualitative comparisons of Argentina, Greece, and Portugal are followed by a statistical study of human rights trials. Theoretically, The Justice Cascade is less ambitious than Sikkink’s earlier work, which sought variously to theorize about advocacy networks, the relative resonance of alternative norms, and the barriers that alternative institutional structures created for efforts to spread new ideas (Sikkink 1991; Keck and Sikkink 1998). Instead, The Justice Cascade describes in rich detail the role of dedicated individuals who worked tirelessly to advance justice and accountability first in Argentina and later abroad. Sikkink then counts the growth of human rights trials across

A Review of International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans

In International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans, Victor Peskin, a professor in the School of Global Studies at Arizona State University and an expert on international criminal justice, has developed a sophisticated analysis of the central dilemmas faced by the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia. According to Peskin, who draws on 300 interviews that he conducted with tribunal officials, local politicians in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and Western diplomats, the success of the ad hoc tribunals has depended on their ability to get local state actors in the Former Yugoslavia (FRY) and Rwanda, and also the international community, to cooperate. The dilemma, of course, is that both local state actors and the international community are faced with important incentives not to support the work of the ad hocs. Most significantly for Peskin, local state support is the key both to building careful court cases based on strong evidence and, importantly, to arresting indicted war criminals. This support, though, is often difficult to obtain, in part because the threat of a backlash from spoilers has inhibited local elites at critical moments from risking the likely (negative) reaction to being overly cooperative. Also important, Peskin argues, is the tribunal’s role in soliciting the support of an international community, often reticent and with conflicting priorities, to cajole, to coerce, and to convince local state elites that compliance is in their best interests. Peskin devotes most of his attention to explaining how the tribunals have tackled these twin dilemmas. The Chief Prosecutor, he argues, is crucial to this and her success hinges on the exercise of soft power and, especially, the use of shaming, persuasion, and negotiation to mobilize support. Peskin is brilliant in elucidating the tactics used by Carla Del Ponte and Louis Arbour to garner the support of leaders in the former Yugoslavia, and also in the West. Peskin’s use of the term soft power to account for the power of the Tribunals is fuzzy, though not more so than many pundits and scholars who embrace this very murky concept; indeed, the Tribunals’ soft power is often contingent on its ability to persuade state leaders in the West to coerce local states into complying by threatening to withdraw aid, to impose sanctions, to deny access, etc. If Peskin is right about the critical importance of the Chief Prosecutor, though, the outlook for the International Criminal Court (ICC) may be bleak. So far, Ocampo’s efforts to persuade states to comply by assisting in arrests have been remarkably unsuccessful. The African Union has declared that arresting Al-Bashir would be harmful to peace negotiations, and the government of Uganda has sought to wrest authority for criminal prosecutions away from the ICC. Even skilled prosecutors are unlikely to score highly in their efforts to persuade states to arrest and transfer sitting leaders in conflicts that are ongoing; in this sense, the success of the tribunals is contingent on prior efforts to end wars and secure peace.