‘bluebeard on trial’: the experience of bathos

It was a characteristic of early international criminal law that a search for precedents coexisted alongside obsessive declarations of ‘unprecedentedness’. The ‘unprecedented’ provided a moral and diplomatic basis for the invention of the field and its various novel doctrines. It is unprecedented outrage that engages—perhaps establishes the existence of—a ‘conscience of mankind’ so vital to the spirit behind the original war crimes tribunals. This chapter concerns itself, then, with the relationship between lawful precedents (often disappointing and ahistorical) and unprecedented, sublime violence, and the production of bathos in the exchange between the two.

Changing Hats

The war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg are well known as key arenas of judicial retribution after the Second World War and for institutionalizing international criminal justice. Their personnel, the ‘Nuremberg lawyers’, have been credited with advancing the cause of international law and (re)building the post-war global order. Critics, though, have chastised what they conceive of as the mistaken recourse to legal ideas and legal language as an either naïve or outright hypocritical, but in any case inadequate way of addressing the challenges of power politics in the Cold War era and beyond. Common to both sides are sweeping, often implicit notions of who the ‘Nuremberg lawyers’ actually were, what drove them, and how they interacted. By categorizing academic training and practical experience, national and biographical contexts, normative inclinations, individual ambitions, and practical functions, this chapter offers a classification of Nuremberg’s lawyers which provides a helpful taxonomic tool for international tribunals more generally.

Child Soldiers and the Contested Imaginary of Community after War

This chapter examines the emergence of the figure of the child soldier in African conflicts and of the criminalization of forced conscription of children in combat in international war crimes jurisprudence, particularly at the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL)—one of the first war crimes tribunals to secure convictions on this count. The chapter examines the context of a civil war that often split small-scale communities and of a society that offers individuals multiple communities of belonging, thus complicating choices about the reintegration of demobilized, war-affected youth. Through two cases of war-affected youth, the chapter questions the humanitarian application of “normative post-traumatic” practices of psychological narrativization of trauma, leading to ambiguous and ambivalent returns in communities of origin, where forms of collective forgetting were preferred as strategies for addressing harms and war reparations.

The Quality of Justice

The author’s interviews with Bosnians generated a lengthy catalogue of frustrations with the performance of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Notably, Bosnian criticisms of the ICTY’s performance are widely echoed by international scholars and practitioners. Yet Bosnians who were interviewed, particularly Bosniaks (Muslims), are overwhelmingly glad the Tribunal was created because it provided justice, however flawed, for atrocious crimes. This chapter elucidates performance-related sources of Bosnians’ satisfaction with the ICTY on the one hand, such as landmark judgments, and disappointments on the other hand, including sentencing patterns and controversial verdicts. The chapter’s findings offer myriad practical lessons for other war crimes tribunals.

William Schabas

The introduction by Roger Clark presents the early life of William Schabas, and some of the influences that must have shaped his career. It offers in Section II of this portrait some ruminations about his thoughts and interests based on a reading of his 2012 book Unimaginable Atrocities: Justice, Politics and Rights at the War Crimes Tribunals. This work is a set of reflections about many of his academic journeys, a kind of memoir but without the normal chronological trappings and personal puffery of the genre. It is perhaps the most opinionated of his oeuvre. It paints with a broader brush than much of his work. It is also this book that has the least trappings of scholarship, that is to say it lacks the copious footnotes that are his normal hallmark.