That Someone Guilty Be Punished - International Center for ...

I. Introduction
On May 25, 1993, the United Nations Security Council improbably launched a new era of
international justice. Amidst a blizzard of resolutions addressing the conflict then raging
in the former Yugoslavia, the Council adopted yet another, this time creating the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). If the new court evoked the potent
symbolism of Nuremberg, its creation also seemed to symbolize the United Nations’ lack of
resolve—another in a series of inadequate responses to atrocities routinely described as the
worst in Europe since World War II.
Before long, however, what began as an ad hoc measure became a global paradigm:
Since the ICTY’s creation, international or internationalized courts have been established to
respond to sweeping atrocities in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Timor
Leste, and a permanent International Criminal Court is now operating in The Hague. Perhaps
more important, the work of these courts has invigorated prosecutions by national courts, the
principal pillars of judicial protection against atrocious crimes and the indispensable partners
of international and hybrid courts.
Moreover, the ICTY and its sister tribunal for Rwanda (the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda, or ICTR) have generated a rich jurisprudence of international humanitarian
law, which now informs the work of national as well as other international courts. These
contributions have been widely recognized, and rightly so. But until recently, few efforts were
made to understand the impact of the ICTY and other international courts on the societies
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