Abstract
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars. As the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set up after WWII, the ICTY has attracted immense interest among legal scholars since its inception, but has failed to garner the same level of attention from researchers in other disciplines, notably linguistics. This represents a significant research gap, as the Tribunal’s public discourse (notably its case law and Annual Reports) can open up interesting avenues of analysis to researchers of law, language, and legal discourse alike. On its official website, the Tribunal claims that it has “irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law” and lists six specific achievements: “Holding leaders accountable; bringing justice to victims; giving victims a voice; establishing the facts; developing international law and strengthening the rule of the law”. While a number of legal scholars have studied and critiqued the level of ‘achievement’ actually attained by the Tribunal against these metrics and others, of interest to linguists is the ways in which this work might be conveyed discursively. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods from the linguistic field of corpus-based critical discourse analysis can be utilised to explore the discursive construction of such achievements in the language of the ICTY.
Highlights
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by The United Nations’ Security Council in 1993 with the purpose of ‘‘prosecuting persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia between 1 January 1991 and a date to be determined by the Security Council upon the restoration of peace’’ [50: Article 2]
In order to illustrate the potential contributions of corpus-based critical discourse analysis to the study of legal language, we demonstrate features of two different corpus linguistic tools (SketchEngine4 and Wmatrix5) in carrying out a small range of methods: frequency, collocation, concordance, and key semantic tag analysis
Summary
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by The United Nations’ Security Council in 1993 with the purpose of ‘‘prosecuting persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia between 1 January 1991 and a date to be determined by the Security Council upon the restoration of peace’’ [50: Article 2]. It is an ad hoc tribunal that was rapidly configured in response to a specific need and with limited scope, time, and jurisdiction, and that has operated since its inception under intense pressure from the UN Security Council to work both efficiently and effectively to achieve goals set out in its mandate [13]. The Tribunal has indicted 161 persons; at the time of writing, proceedings are concluded on 147 of the Accused, and proceedings are ongoing for the remaining 14 cases [28]. This is not to say that the Tribunal has functioned entirely as envisioned; its ongoing work is being undertaken well beyond the initial timeframe. The Tribunal has failed to meet these milestones, and it is anticipated at the time of writing (May 2015) that closure will take place in 2017, after which national courts in the former Yugoslavia and the UN Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals will take over and complete all resting cases [53]
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