International criminal law: a view from the trenches - the accidental jurist.

• Published date: 22 March 2017
• Author: Hollis, Brenda J.
• Date: 22 March 2017

THE PROSECUTOR, RESIDUAL SPECIAL COURT FOR SIERRA LEONE, RESERVE INTERNATIONAL CO-PROSECUTOR, EXTRAORDINARY CHAMBERS IN THE COURTS OF CAMBODIA SEPTEMBER 12, 2016 12PM-1PM ANHEUSER-BUSCH HALL TRIAL COURTROOM 309

Thank you very much. I am very honored to be here with you today. I think that introduction by Professor Sadat really means one thing: that I'm old. So, I do appreciate the introduction. I want to thank Professor Sadat for inviting me and for the very warm welcome she and her colleagues have given me. And I want to thank her for her contributions and commitment to international criminal justice--very important contributions. The world community will benefit from all that she has done. I also understand that congratulations are in order, that you are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the creation of this law school. I'd also like to congratulate the faculty and students here for what is, very evidently, a dynamic law program.

I should make it clear that my comments here today are purely my personal observations, my personal comments, and in no way reflect official positions of the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone or the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. I'm not going to provide you today a formal presentation on the law. I think you get a lot of that information from your professors here. Rather, what I would like to do today is to share my personal reflections on international criminal justice from the perspective of the experiences that Professor Sadat has already remarked on to you. My comments will focus primarily on the two ad hoc tribunals--the Yugoslav Tribunal and the Rwanda Tribunal--and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. These are the courts with which I have worked most closely.

Decades after the Nuremburg and Tokyo Trials, the international community, the super powers, once again worked together to create ad hoc international criminal tribunals - the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals. We know that with the creation of these tribunals, for one shining moment at least, the global community came together to act against barbarity--to achieve some measure of justice for the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of victims of international crimes.

In creating the Yugoslav and Rwanda Tribunals, the UN Security Council used its power under Chapter 7. Why did it do that? Why did it act to create the international tribunals to investigate and try the crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity? Perhaps it acted for self-serving reasons. Perhaps it acted for altruistic reasons. Perhaps it acted because it saw these crimes as the cause of regional instability - as sowing the seeds for future atrocities and future unrest. Perhaps it acted because of the international outcry against the crimes that were being committed - or because of the horrific nature of crimes themselves. Perhaps, it acted in the hope that these tribunals could be used as one means of bringing about a true, lasting peace in these affected societies. Because after all, individuals want accountability for wrongs done to them. Criminal accountability is one part, of one package, of the many packages that are needed to bring societies forward and out of these catastrophic events. But, whatever the motivation, in creating these tribunals, the Security Council, I believe, acted to advance the highest aspirations that we have for justice. And, regardless of its motivations, it also acted to create mechanisms to give victims and survivors and the affected societies access to justice through independent impartial criminal justice systems. Because that is what these international courts are, nothing less and nothing more. And that is how they should be judged, how well they have carried out their judicial mandates.

We have this one shining moment. And we have talked about some of the reasons why, perhaps, the international community did react and create these two tribunals. But why should we as an international community react and create these types of tribunals and courts? What I suggest to you is that as members of the global community we should act to bring access to justice because, at their base, these crimes are violations of fundamental human rights, human rights all of us possess. They are violations of the norms all civilized societies should, and for the most part do, abide by. They are atrocities and violations that result in horrific suffering for countless victims and survivors - countless members of our global community. These international crimes are atrocities beyond the imagination of most of us. We cannot really envision the sustained viciousness of crimes committed on such a massive scale--murders, torture, mutilation, rapes, and other sexual savagery of both men and women, boys and girls--crimes that leave many victims and survivors devoid of hope for the future. Victims and survivors who have lost everything: Their lives, their limbs, their mental and physical integrity, their security, and sense of security, their homes and possessions, their dignity.

What are the human realities of these international crimes--the realities that are too often lost in the discussion about the legal intricacies of these crimes and debates on the politics of the situations giving rise to these crimes? The realities are what I am going to show you in the next few slides--the reality of hundreds of thousands of people--men women, children, slaughtered in Rwanda, in Cambodia, tens of thousands in Sierra Leone, in Bosnia. They are the realities of countless thousands who have been beaten, tortured, and starved. They are the realities of tens of thousands who have been mutilated, with no respect to age, no respect to gender. And they are the realities of thousands upon thousands of women and girls--men and boys as well, who were subjected to capture, beatings, torture, rapes, and then were revictimized by the communities that shunned them and the offspring of those rapes. Shunned then for wrongs done to them, not for any wrongs that they had done. The realities also include millions of people forced to flee from their homes with only what they could carry with them, if they were allowed to carry anything with them at all.

These calamities are the accumulation of individual calamities. Those individual calamities are what we recorded as we investigated these international crimes--beginning at the micro level to build the picture at the macro level. Of course, we remember all the people that we interacted with. In the course of my career I have been involved with hundreds of interviews with victims and survivors. But some of those human tragedies, real human calamites stand out in my mind, as they do in the minds of the colleagues who also investigated and prosecuted these crimes. I would like to share some of those recollections with you because they explain to us why we should act as a global community against these horrific crimes.

I recall the testimony of one elderly man who himself had been imprisoned in a concentration camp in the former Yugoslavia during WWII. He once again found himself in a death camp, in Omarska death camp in Prijedor municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In that camp, he was held in a huge building that was packed with people who had been captured because of their ethnicity. He was in a room where there were so many people that they couldn't sit down. They had to stand up. When someone passed out or died, they had to lift them up and pass them out of the room. That's how they were packed into that room, in the heat of summer, which in Bosnia and Herzegovina could be in the 90s or even 100 degrees. On one occasion, his captors came into the room and called him out. They told him that he had to go to another part of that building and bring his son out from another crowded room. He knew that they were going to kill his son, and told them, "I can't do that." And they said to him, "You do that or we kill everybody in this room." So he went, found his son, and told his son "Son, you have to come with me." And his son said "I can't father, I'm afraid." And he said, "Son, I am afraid too, but we have to go." He took his son out, and handed him over to their captors, to his torture and death. And I recall the testimony of a young man who told of holding his father in his arms throughout the night as the father's breathing and voice became fainter and fainter, and as he eventually died from the sustained beatings he received in this death camp.

I also...