Accountability for international crimes: From conjecture to reality

Abstract

A t a 1987 international colloquium devoted to the Nuremberg trials Professor Eric David posed a hypothetical question — could Augusto Pinochet be arrested and tried in Belgium for acts such as enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture and unlawful detention committed since his ascendance to power?1 While Professor David answered in the affirmative,2 at the time it was only academic conjecture that such a scenario could ever come to pass. And yet, just over a decade later, his hypothetical question proved to be prescient. Augusto Pinochet was arrested in the United Kingdom, whose highest court eventually ruled that he did not enjoy immunity from legal process for torture and conspiracy to commit torture perpetrated while he was in office.3 It was a defining moment in the fight against impunity and perhaps the most important milestone in the struggle for international justice since the Nuremberg trials. The proceedings against Pinochet did not, however, come out of the blue. Ever since the end of the Cold War and the resulting new impetus in international relations, the international community had been setting important markers in the fight against impunity.The trend only accelerated after the Pinochet case, allowing the fullfledged emergence of what can now be called a global movement