Handle with Care

Abstract

Abstract The chapter starts with claims made for the potential historical value of a set of juridical by-products: the evidence gathered, presented, and scrutinized in international criminal courts. Recently, criminologists and others have started to make use of resources generated or collected by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to describe and analyse international crimes. This chapter argues that while evidence and transcripts from international criminal courts have great potential as a source of data for analyses in criminology, and by extension other social sciences and historical research, they need to be handled with care. The chapter compares judicial and scholarly approaches, examines access and transparency issues around the construction of a body of evidence in the trial process and matters relating to witnesses. They make a strong case for using the ICTY as part of scholarly efforts to make sense of the violent disintegration of State and society in Yugoslavia.