‘The judgement is not made now; the judgement will be made in the future’: ‘politically motivated’ defence lawyers and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda”s ‘historical record’.

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Corporealities of violence in Southern and Eastern Africa

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Abstracts from the NIHR INVOLVE Conference 2017

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A legacy deferred?: The international criminal tribunal for Rwanda at 20 years

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Representing Rwanda: Questions and Challenges

While members of the Rwandan political élite, both in power and in exile, do not deny that the 1994 genocide occurred, there are significant differences in how they explain its cause, and the degree of context they consider necessary for a ‘true’ representation of the conflict to emerge. Despite this, recent journalistic works on Rwanda present a monovocal, ‘factual’ narrative about the genocide. While such narratives are clearly attractive to a wider readership, anthropology’s concern to give voice to competing representations as a cause, rather than subsidiary feature of conflict places researchers in a sensitive and difficult position. To what extent do anthropological treatments of conflict necessarily oppose such ‘factual’ narratives, or can they be regarded as complementary?</jats:p

"We are not a Truth Commission": fragmented narratives and the historical record at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Legal practitioners at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) are exercised by the question of whether their endeavour should seek to intentionally create an 'historical record'. Their views are framed by a supposed distinction between Truth Commissions and Trials and by the assumption that the practice and method of law and historiography are distinct. Such distinctions are, however, unsustainable given that both trials and Truth Commissions require coercive, enticed remembering and that both the lawyer and historian vicariously re-enact the past in the search for meaning. Similarly, the methodology of the oral historian is not distinct from that employed in a trial. And yet, the apparent celebration of orality at the ICTR is matched by a desire to instantaneously convert mutable speech into immutable text. While the ultimate mutable text, the judgement, declares a legal finality, it intentionally directs the reader to the process of fact discovery preserved in a globally accessible, digital database. While there remains a tension between the digital archive and its physical shadow, an historical record awaits consumption. The question, however, remains who will the consumers be and to what purpose will this record be put

Genocide never sleeps ::living law at the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda /

Accounts of international criminal courts have tended to consist of reflections on abstract legal texts, on judgements and trial transcripts. Genocide Never Sleeps, based on ethnographic research at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), provides an alternative account, describing a messy, flawed human process in which legal practitioners faced with novel challenges sought to reconfigure long-standing habits and opinions while maintaining a commitment to 'justice'. From the challenges of simultaneous translation to collaborating with colleagues from different legal traditions, legal practitioners were forced to scrutinise that which normally remains assumed in domestic law. By providing an account of this process, Genocide Never Sleeps not only provides a unique insight into the exceptional nature of the ad hoc, improvised ICTR and the day-to-day practice of international criminal justice, but also holds up for fresh inspection much that is naturalised and assumed in unexceptional, domestic legal processes