Introduction

FROM Cambodia to Guatemala, from the Kurds in Iraq to the Armenians in Turkey, from Stalin’s purges to Mao’s Great Leap Forward, much of the twentieth century has been characterized by impunity for the worst human rights atrocities. Other than the 1990s, the only real exceptions to this trend was in the case of Nuremberg and Tokyo. But that was an exception quickly overtaken by the tensions and realpolitik of the Cold War, which put a stop to any notion that Nuremberg might represent an ongoing promise of justice for the worst human rights crimes. Unfortunately , the message sent until the 1990s was that tyrants literally could get away with murder. Indeed, while governments went to tremendous lengths to address common crime, if you committed huge official crimes—genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity—you still were invited to peace conferences, or given comfortable exiles in tropical climes. That, of course, began to change in the 1990s. It changed, as Samantha Power notes in her book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, for the wrong reason: because the international community was not willing to take the steps required to stop genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. But whatever the original motives, it did begin to change, and we saw the establishment of so-called ad hoc or country- or region-specific tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. We saw, most recently, the process of creating a mixed international-national tribunal for Sierra Leone to address the atrocities that occurred during the course of the civil war there. We have seen the United Nations take over the justice process in place like Kosovo or East Timor. We have seen the emergence of actual universal jurisdiction with the cases of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Hissen SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Winter 2002) Introduction BY KENNETH ROTH Habré in Chad and a host of others that are in fits and starts being attempted. All this has tremendous importance in responding to the pleas of victims and their families, who until now have confronted these kinds of atrocities alone, with no place to turn and no chance of being heard. But it also holds great promise for deterrence; although we are still very much at the rudimentary stages of the emergence of an international system of justice, we at least can begin to see the prospect that when a tyrant contemplates embarking on a path of mass murder, he or she might think twice, aware of the possibility that committing those kinds of crimes would jeopardize their freedom in the future. In this sense, international justice offers a tremendous supplement to the traditional tools of the human rights movement. Traditionally we have been able to rely on shaming—the exposure of atrocities, and the subjection of abusive governments to public opprobrium. We have been able to generate, at times, economic pressure—the withholding of military assistance, or the conditioning of aid on an end to atrocities. In extreme cases we have resorted to trade sanctions or even military intervention to try to stop ongoing atrocities. Justice has some advantages beyond these tools in that, unlike sanctions, which tend to affect a large population of otherwise innocent people, and unlike even military intervention, the brunt of which tends to be borne by low-level troops who have had the misfortune of being placed on the front lines, justice targets the people at the top, or at least holds forth that promise. It allows us to apply perhaps the most targeted sanction available, and to threaten people who are directing and sponsoring these sorts of crimes with the prospect of a life or a long time in prison. So that is where we have come, and it really has been a remarkable evolution over less than 10 years. But of course it still is a very precarious moment. More than 60 governments have ratified the treaty creating the International Criminal Court, thereby establishing a permanent tribunal with potentially global scope. A 1086 SOCIAL RESEARCH tyrant anyplace in the world who commits these crimes can now, at least theoretically, be brought before this tribunal. But at this...