Sharon Weill, Kim Thuy Seelinger, and Kerstin Bree Carlson (editors), The President on Trial: Prosecuting Hissène Habré

Abstract

For a time, the creation of international criminal justice institutions seemed to follow a predictable and linear path. Following a long period of inactivity after the post-World War II trials, there was a burst of creation starting in 1993 with the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), followed by the establishment of a series of ad hoc international or hybrid tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia.1 The culmination of this creative period was the International Criminal Court (ICC), the first permanent international criminal court, established by the Rome Statute in 1998 and ratified by the required 60 states that would allow the court to come into existence by 2002. The ICC seemed to offer a simple and comprehensive solution to the expensive and impractical problem of trying to establish an ad hoc tribunal following each new atrocity. It obligated states to investigate and...