From Viability to Impact

Twenty years after the UN Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Court remains fertile ground for contested claims about what it can achieve, the degree to which it has met specific goals and whose interests it should serve. A series of high-profile acquittals since November 2012 have stoked renewed controversy,1 dispelling prospects that some measure of consensus might emerge as the ICTY approached retirement. Animated debates about the ICTY now span several disciplines, as the books reviewed here reflect. Approaching the Tribunal from several perspectives, they illuminate what it took to secure arrests of ICTY suspects; select aspects of the Tribunal’s judicial output; and how former Yugoslav citizens perceive its work. Together, they throw into sharp relief a fundamental question: How do we know whether the ICTY has been a success? When the Security Council created the ICTY, its action was widely seen as a fig leaf for its failure to staunch the violence then raging in the former Yugoslavia. While many welcomed the ICTY despite such concerns, the Court’s early years were marked by debilitating doubts, centered above all on whether it could secure custody of those charged with crimes of surpassing cruelty and scope. Lacking a constabulary, the ICTY had to rely on states to arrest its suspects (prompting its first president to call the Court a ‘giant without arms and legs’), and arrests were glaringly rare in its early years. Against this background, many still cite as a signal achievement the fact that all of the Tribunal’s indictments have been answered

Criminology · Political science · Scope (computer science · Sociology · Tribunal · European and International Law Studies · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Law

• Sociology of Transitional Justice

  Open Access•Toshihiro Abe•Japanese Sociological Review•2021

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