Transitional Justice in Bosnia: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, criminal prosecutions have become an increasingly common international response to the complex and vexed question of how to deal with human rights violations. Whereas amnesia and amnesty were in the past considered acceptable and in some cases necessary as remedies for human rights violations, today the emphasis is very strongly on individual accountability. Criminal trials have thus become a core transitional justice mechanism, to which the steady proliferation of war crimes tribunals attests. The spread of these tribunals, in turn, reflects the growing expectations of retributive justice and its role in post-conflict societies. It must, however, be emphasized that while the virtues of criminal trials have been widely extolled, “seldom are such assertions grounded in empirical data” (Weinstein and Stover 2004, 4). Empirical research in this area is thus essential: The imputed merits of war crimes tribunals cannot be simply assumed.KeywordsSecurity CouncilInternational CriminalGeneva ConventionCriminal TrialInternational Criminal TribunalThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.