Unmet Expectations and the Legitimacy of Transitional Justice Institutions : The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Unmet Expectations

scholarly journals Traumatized War Criminal? Documenting the Case of Esad Landžo

2020 ◽  
pp. 105756772094078
Author(s):  
Olivera Simic
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Psychological Trauma ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Serious Injury ◽  
Main Protagonist

Perpetrators’ voices have been traditionally ignored in the transitional justice field and beyond. Esad Landžo was only 19 when he committed the crimes of willful killing, torturing, and causing serious injury to the detainees of notorious Čelebići camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2001, Landžo was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for the crimes he committed in 1992. After serving two thirds of his sentence in 2006 and settling in Finland, Landžo and the Danish filmmaker, Lars Feldballe Petersen, embarked on the project of making a documentary movie about Landžo’s traumatic memories, remorse, and regret. Landžo had a strong urge to extend his apology to each victim individually and in 2015 went to Čelebići to meet his former detainees. This article will build on a scarce conversation in scholarly, and legal discourse, as to why psychological trauma is considered to be an experience that belongs to victims. It will analyze difficult and untold perpetrators’ experiences of criminal acts and explore whether in these experiences there is potential for inner and group understanding. This article draws on the author’s interviews with Landžo, the main protagonist in the movie The Unforgiven: A War’s Criminal Remorse, a film that documents the extraordinary story of Landžo: from his denial to redemption.

Some Kind of Justice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Orentlicher
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Justice ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Local Impact ◽  
Over Time

Created in 1993, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has operated longer than any war crimes tribunal in history. It thus offers a singularly important case study of how and why the local impact of an international criminal tribunal (ICT) evolves over time; the circumstances in which international justice can advance the normative, reparative, and other aims of transitional justice; and, more generally, the goals ICTs are either well-suited or unlikely to advance. The book explores the ICTY’s impact in Serbia, whose wartime leader plunged the former Yugoslavia into vicious ethnic conflict, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which experienced searing atrocities culminating in the Srebrenica genocide, over the life of the Tribunal. It focuses on the Tribunal’s impact in three spheres: victims’ experience of justice; official, elite, and community discourses about wartime atrocities, as well as official gestures of acknowledgment; and domestic accountability processes, including the work of a hybrid court in Bosnia. While highlighting the perspectives of Bosnians and Serbians interviewed by the author, the book incorporates a rich body of interdisciplinary research to deepen their insights.

Narratives of Justice and War in Croatia

2020 ◽  
pp. 445-461
Author(s):  
Ivor Sokolić
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Human Rights Norms ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Self Defence

This chapter examines the relationship between war and justice narratives in Croatia, based on focus groups, dyads, and interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. The war narrative is based on a pervasive conception of self-defence against a larger Serbian aggressor. It contrasts with a justice narrative that is focused on the norms of transitional justice and the expressivist effects of trials. The two narratives exist in the same space and interact with each other. This chapter outlines these narratives and analyses their reproduction. It argues that the emotional war narrative’s strength makes it difficult for the justice narrative to take hold and, consequently, for the trickle-down expressivist effects of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and human rights norms to occur. This tolerance for deviance was based on notions of legality that were defined differently in relation to Croats and Serbs.

“I Would Do the Same Again”

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivera Simić
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
International Criminal Justice ◽  
International Tribunal ◽  
Return Home

After more than 20 years in operation, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has closed down at the end of 2017. Biljana Plavšić made history by becoming the only woman, of 161 individuals, indicted by the ICTY. She was also the highest ranking official and the first Serb leader to plead guilty to charges raised against her before the ICTY. After entering into a plea agreement and serving two thirds of her 11-year sentence in Sweden, she returned to Belgrade in 2009 where she has been living ever since. In this article, I draw on interviews I undertook with Plavšić in the course of 2017. In the first part of the article, I briefly introduce Plavšić and situate the study within the field of international criminal justice and transitional justice. I then proceed to discuss four themes that Plavšić most frequently returned to during our conversations. These themes offer an original perspective into Plavšić’s experience of being tried and sentenced by the international tribunal and her subsequent release and return home. This article aims to fill a gap in the literature by analyzing the reflections on the ICTY from its only woman defendant.

scholarly journals The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: The Promise and Reality of Reconciliation in Croatia

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Parker
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Local Level ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
International Community ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
State And Local

The international community is increasingly interested in promoting post-conflict reconciliation in a variety of forms, with trials and truth commissions featured most prominently. The contemporary academic discussion over transitional justice (and the practice of transitional justice itself) is largely focused on whether and how these types of large-scale national transitional justice mechanisms contribute to reconciliation. This article examines the promise and reality of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to contribute to national reconciliation. Ultimately, the ability of state-wide policies to contribute to reconciliation rests on the active participation of local level actors. This requires political backing at the state and local level beyond that of just the international community. More attention needs to be paid to domestic cultural factors in the initial decision to implement state-wide transitional justice procedures, and bottom-up mechanisms must be built into any large scale approach to reconciliation.

Perpetrators and victims

Focaal ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 (57) ◽  
pp. 50-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Mannergren Selimovic
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
The Other ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Perpetrators And Victims ◽  
Individual Justice ◽  
Local Discourses

This article juxtaposes local understandings and narratives on justice and reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina with those of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). By looking at notions of collective innocence/guilt, the development of victim identities, and the relativization of the suffering of the other, it explores the failure of the ICTY to offer a convincing model of transitional justice in Bosnia. Although the ICTY disciplines the boundary between victim and perpetrator through measures for shared truth and individual justice, local discourses resist or transform these representations, thus tending to entrench rather than transcend national divisions. The findings of this article challenge prevalent instrumentalist understandings of transitional justice and its role in facilitating reconciliation. The article focuses on the communities of Konjic and Srebrenica and the ICTY outreach conferences held in these towns in 2004 and 2005.

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