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27 Cardozo L. Rev. 1615 (2005-2006)
Transitional Justice: Postwar Legacies

handle is hein.journals/cdozo27 and id is 1635 raw text is: TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE: POSTWAR LEGACIES Ruti Teitet INTRODUCTION In the public imagination, transitions to liberal rule are commonly linked with punishment and the trials of ancient regimes. Thus, the trials of Kings Charles I and Louis XVI constitute enduring symbols of the English and French Revolutions, which both led to transformation from monarchic to republican rule. Similarly, more than sixty years ago, the Nuremberg trials were convened to bring to justice the masterminds of World War II's terror, and to lay the foundation for a democratic Germany. Even as the international community commemorates the anniversary of these trials, it is also in the midst of multiple efforts at international criminal justice. At the present moment, there are an unprecedented number of indicted political leaders in the dock, or, the shadow of its threat: Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet, Charles Taylor, Alberto Fujimori. Moreover, there are war crimes tribunals to prosecute violations of humanitarian law in former Yugoslavia, the attempted genocide in Rwanda, a hybrid court in Sierra Leone, as well the newly established standing International Criminal Court (ICC). These new tribunals re-raise the question of the ongoing legacy of the Nuremberg tribunal, and of how it informed the aims and forms of transitional and post-conflict justice. Nuremberg established the principle of individual criminal accountability for human rights violations perpetrated against civilians in wartime: that certain crimes are so heinous that they violate the law of nations and may be prosecuted anywhere. The twentieth century has witnessed the commission of terrible atrocities: Turkey's massacre of the Armenians; Bangladesh; the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia; Iraq's brutal campaign against its Kurds; the more recent Hutu-Tutsi massacres in Rwanda; and the crimes of war-torn Yugoslavia. Yet, until recently, half a century after Nuremberg, there were few attempts to enforce international accountability. The twentieth century's record was largely one of state persecution and impunity, keeping alive the Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, New York Law School. 1615