Justice delayed? Internationalised criminal tribunals and peace-building in Lebanon, Bosnia and Cambodia

Abstract

In countries emerging from violent conflict and/or mass atrocity, there is an urgent need to promote stability and often also widespread demand for accountability for abuses which have taken place. Debate has raged among scholars and practitioners about whether justice should be sacrificed or delayed for the sake of peace, or should be promoted even if it is in the short term destabilising. In many countries emerging from conflict processes of accountability, or transitional justice processes, operate almost simultaneously alongside processes of peace-building such as disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of ex-combatants, reform of the security sector and rule of law promotion, in the immediate aftermath of conflict. These can include domestic processes of truth-telling, prosecution, reparation and amnesty, or internationally promoted processes such as international criminal tribunals. They can also include internationalised criminal tribunals, which have mixed national–international staff. While scholarship has increasingly focused on the engagement between transitional justice and peace-building processes in the relatively near term, far less has examined the role of processes of accountability that follow conflict termination by a significant period of time, justice delayed. Drawing on recent fieldwork, the authors examine three internationalised criminal tribunals developed some 15 years after the termination of conflict in countries that experienced three very different types of conflict, conflict resolution and peace-building or reconstruction in Bosnia, Lebanon and Cambodia. They find that despite claims made by advocates for such institutions, such tribunals may only have limited impact on longer term peace-building and that the effects of flawed peace-building activities affect the operating environment of the tribunals.