Remembering atrocities: legal archives and the discursive conditions of witnessing

Abstract

ABSTRACT International criminal tribunals and courts, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), are commonly understood within the legal transitional justice scholarship as the primary response to mass human rights violations. Tribunals and courts are expected to address the issue of impunity, but also uncover the truth of what happened and why. The legal scholarship often understands the ICTR as able to produce a collective legal memory of the atrocities through the memories of witnesses. Using the ICTR as a case study, the aim of this conceptually led article is to respond to these discussions by exploring the potential role ICTR archival material can have in extending our understanding of the construction of memory at international criminal courts and tribunals. The article uses insights from discourse studies, specifically based on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. It applies these insights to an exploratory analysis of legal documents relating to the selection of witnesses from the ICTR archive and interview transcripts with ICTR personnel from the archive of the University of Washington (UoW). This exploration suggests that the pre-trial stage shape, edit and restrict in significant ways, determining which individuals can be witnesses and what these witnesses can remember.