The Politics of International Criminal Justice Frédéric Mégret * Full text available: PDF format ** Ball, Howard, Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide: The Twentieth-Century Experience. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Pp. 288. $35.00. Bass, Gary Jonathan, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. 368. 8050.69. Beigbeder, Yves, Judging War Criminals: The Politics of International Justice. New York: St Martin's Press, 1999. Pp. xvii, 230. $65.00. Hazan, Pierre, La justice face E0 la guerre: de Nuremberg E0 la Haye. Paris: Stock, 2000. Pp. 286. 8017.38. Robertson, Geoffrey, Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice. New York: The New Press, 1999. Pp. xxxiv, 454. 8023.18. Scharf, Michael P., Balkan Justice: The Story Behind the First International War Crimes Trial Since Nuremberg. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1997. Pp. xvii, 340. $28.00. 1. Introduction For many decades, the study of international criminal tribunals was the jealous preserve, the mascot almost, of international lawyers. Throughout the Cold War, it was lawyers who kept the discipline of international criminal law alive, when the more worldly inclined would have dismissed it as a quaint irrelevance. When prospects for international criminal justice boomed, international lawyers were also the prime force behind the promotion and study of the newly created international criminal tribunals. Lawyers of course might not be too surprised to find that international criminal justice was operating in an environment that was imbued with politics, but nor could they be relied on to make that case fully (be it to argue the power of norms) except in the most general of terms. It would have been difficult, conversely, to find a single book-length treatment of the issue from an international relations perspective as an academic discipline, let alone from its realist mainstream. Political scientists seemed remarkably oblivious to the potentially paradigm-challenging qualities of international criminal justice, were it to prove the durable phenomenon that lawyers occasionally announced it to be.1 The reduction of the entire enterprise to a more or less arbitrary exercise of power-legitimization seemed to be the discipline's best try at the question. One explanation for this may lie in professional trajectories. For the international lawyer's predominantly normative endeavour, project and reality often mix: international criminal justice also exists as a field of inquiry because it needs to exist to sustain the profession's progressist narratives. For the political scientist who would devote his attention to the world `as it is', by contrast, legal phenomena only become interesting when they can make at least a pretence at influencing world events. But, because international criminal justice seemed ornamental at best, it could be safely relegated to the periphery of some discrete subdiscipline, for example under the catch-all expression of `transitional justice', somewhere at the intersection of public policy and ethical theory. It is only by the time the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) survived Dayton and that the lawyers' narrative seemed to be at least partially vindicated that pressure has increased for political scientists to account for the phenomenon, if only to debunk some of its wildest claims. The Pinochet case, the transfer of Milosevic to The Hague Tribunal, and the entry into force of the ICC Statute have of course only brought a tinge of urgency to the whole issue. Somewhere on the fault-lines of law and politics, therefore, a number of books have emerged that seek to tackle the (surely not revolutionary) intuition that there just may be more to international criminal justice than the unfolding of law's master-plan - although perhaps also something less than the exercise of brute force. All come with a certain amount of hype2 that will be familiar to those who are acquainted with the occasionally brash youthfulness of the discipline, and claim in one way or another to be the first to `weave together history, philosophy, international law, and politics into a comprehensive and engrossing account of the increasingly significant movement for world human rights'.3 All seem almost designed to have reviewers gasp at their wonderful timeliness, complete with last minute addenda and epilogues. Together, they form part of a burgeoning subgenre which has at its core an interrogation about the Law's behaviour `at the limit'. They set out to explore this grey zone where the only way Law seems to be able to bend power is at the cost of becoming something very much like it. Michael Scharf had initiated the process by publishing Balkan Justice, a detailed account of the trial of Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb camp guard, the first to occur before the ICTY. The book was a timely rendering of a story that at the time remained relatively unknown, although in retrospect it could have been little more than a first sketch. Yves Beigbeder's The Politics of International Justice was published in 1999 in the aftermath of the Rome Conference. It is a dense book that manages to cover a lot of ground. Its author, who is better known for his publications on the WHO and UN reform, admits to being a newcomer to the study of international criminal justice, although, judging by some of the repetition that so characterizes the field, one might think this was not a weakness. With Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide, Howard Ball has published what is a fairly comprehensive history of war crimes in the twentieth century, and one combined with a vigorous defence of the ICC. Geoffrey Robertson's Crimes Against Humanity is certainly the most ardent of the books reviewed. Prefaced by Kenneth Roth, the Director of Human Rights Watch, the book is a kind of passionate plea for all things human rights-ish. Pierre Hazan's La Justice face E0 la guerre is the only book in French of the series reviewed, and one that is backed by the author's extensive first-hand experience of Rwanda and Bosnia, and buttressed by many interviews with key participants. Finally, Bass's book, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals, brings what is probably the most theoretically sophisticated - although not necessarily the most convincing - account of international criminal justice in a world of states, backed by important archival work. The books are of course quite different in their format, approach, sensitivity and scope. The authors themselves come from a variety of backgrounds and approaches. Only Michael Scharf and Yves Beigbeder are specialists in international law; Geoffrey Robertson is a barrister and human rights activist (Howard Ball was also a civil rights defender); Pierre Hazan and Gary Jonathan Bass are journalists; the latter and Howard Ball are also professors of political science, respectively at Stanford and Vermont Universities; Michael Scharf adds his experience as Attorney-Adviser for United Nations Affairs at the Department of State. Some of the books are clearly more sophisticated than others. Where Hazan is subtle and shows intellectual depth, Robertson just seems to get carried away, Bass tries to make too many claims at the same time and Beigbeder and Ball seem a trifle bland. Despite these differences, however, it is remarkable how all tell essentially the same story in different ways, or perhaps slightly different stories about essentially the same phenomenon. All are broadly sympathetic to the cause of international criminal justice (both Robertson's and Beigbeder's books are prefaced by respected personalities within the human rights community), and mildly optimistic about its chances of success. All, at the same time, are willing to test the law's claims against a few hard facts of international life. Even those written by lawyers, for example, share the essential characteristic that they principally adopt an `external' point of view on the law, one that does not take international criminal lawyers' claims at face value, and makes a serious effort at contextualizing norms in their setting. All the more reason, one might think, for international lawyers to take good notice. It should be clear, at any rate, that international lawyers cannot, as they have sometimes been wont to do, simply retreat into denial when confronted with the issue of power, or otherwise risk harming the project of international criminal justice. This review essay cannot possibly do justice to all the episodes surveyed by the books or the wealth of analyses that they have produced. It will therefore focus on what is arguably their central theme, namely, their attempt to deal generally with the issue of the nature of international criminal justice, particularly as seen through the creation and operation of the in many ways emblematic ICTY. More specifically, I will be looking at how the authors understand the formation of international criminal justice as a phenomenon anchored in power yet simultaneously capable of transcending it. Behind these questions, it is argued, lies nothing less than the issue of the very possibility of a fully functioning international criminal justice system in the age of globalization, and, behind that, some familiar questions about the relations of law and power. * Research Associate, European University Institute, Florence. ** The free viewer (Acrobat Reader) for PDF file is available at the Adobe Systems. 1 The few attempts that were made remained somewhat succinct and were characteristically published in journals with a strong legal component. Cohen, `Application of the Realist and Liberal Perspectives to the Implementation of War Crimes Trials: Case Studies of Nuremberg and Bosnia', 2 UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs (1997) 113. To this reviewer's knowledge, at least one political science PhD dissertation has been written on the issue (Eric K. Leonard, `International Relations Theory and the International Criminal Court: Understanding Global Justice' (PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 2001)), although it remains unpublished to this day. 2 The most overblown probably comes with the description in the Observer of Robertson's Crimes Against Humanity as `a book to stop another Holocaust' (Michael Foot, `Liberty, Fraternity, Statuary', Observer, 15 August 1999, Review section, 11; after suggesting that Trafalgar Square be renamed Thomas Paine Square, the review ends with the following comment: `But why not a Geoffrey Robertson triumphal arch, millions will be reading his book in the century to come if we are serious in our intention to stop those massacres'), although others can claim similarly eulogistic back-cover claims. According to William Schulz, Ball's book `should become the definitive text for understanding the world's greatest crimes and how to stop them'. It seemed to this reviewer that all the books fell somewhat short of these descriptions. 3 Crimes Against Humanity, front flap. The front flap of Stay the Hand of Vengeance also claims that Bass `offers an unprecedented look at behind international war crimes tribunals'.
	© 1990-2004 European Journal of International Law All comments and suggestions should be sent to webmaster This site is part of the Academy of European Law online, a joint partnership of the Jean Monnet Center at NYU School of Law and the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute. This file was last modified: Sunday, February 09, 2003 10:15PM