An Interview with Ambassador David Scheffer, the Architect of the Modern War Crimes Tribunals

What inspired your career in international law? Have you been interested in foreign affairs since childhood?

Yes, actually I have. I was a paperboy for many years starting at age ten in Norman, Oklahoma. As I folded the papers, I read the front page and it started to stimulate my interest in world affairs every time I saw an article about world events. I then had the opportunity, again when I was ten years old, to travel to Europe for three weeks with a friend whose father was teaching in Germany. That trip opened up the world. From then on, I was hooked on foreign affairs.

But the real inspiration for my current work was in college, where I had several inspiring professors. The same was true in law school with another professor, and, with all that behind me, I was very much locked in.

I read that you were a student of Michael Walzer, author of the classic book on ethics and war, Just and Unjust Wars.

We were guinea pigs for him. He was drafting the book at the time, and he tried out the arguments of his book with us in class. We were his debating team, and it was an extraordinary experience and certainly further inspired my interest.

How did you come to work as the senior advisor for then U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright in 1993? 

As with so many things in life, it was largely luck. I had worked on the Clinton campaign for president on the foreign policy team. I had written memoranda about the United Nations for candidate Clinton to brief him on those issues. After he won the election, I filed my application for a job in the administration. I heard nothing back and I was becoming disillusioned. 

Then, on January 3, 1993, my wife said, “David, in these situations, intelligent people actually make a call.” So I called someone I knew on the State Department transition team and said I hadn’t heard anything on my application. She said, “Oh, you want to work with us?” And I said, “Yes, of course.” She said, “Well, I’m going to the opera tonight with my close friend Madeleine Albright, and if you want me to mention your name, she’s looking for someone to help her prepare for the confirmation hearings before the Senate.” I said, “Yes, please mention my name to Dr. Albright.” 

The next morning I got a call from Madeleine Albright and she said, “I went to the opera with your friend, and she spoke all about you during intermission.  I’d like you to come over and talk with me about helping me get through the confirmation.”  So, about an hour later, I was over at the State Department, talking with Madeleine at her transition office.  I immediately came on board and served with her for eight years.  So making that one phone call changed my life.

That’s a fascinating story. What were you doing up to that time?

In the four years prior to the Clinton administration, I was with the Carnegie Endowment International for Peace writing and speaking and researching international law and foreign policy.  Before that, I was a lawyer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee Staff, and before that I spent eight and a half years with an international law firm, four of which were in the Singapore office. My clients were all over Asia and it hooked me on international law because that was precisely what I was practicing over those years.

So you had a strong grounding in international law before you worked with Madeleine Albright.

It was substantial because I had practiced private and the public international law. With the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Carnegie Endowment, I did nothing but address the key issues in American foreign policy that intersect with international law.

What was your role when then Ambassador Albright hired you in 1993?

I was the senior advisor and counsel, but I was positioned in her State Department office where she worked at least two days a week. She positioned me in Washington because I was to be her deputy on the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council and she was the principal on the Principals Committee. These are the major foreign policy making units of the U.S. government. The Deputies Committee is constantly meeting in the Situation Room of the White House, so you need to be in Washington to be part of that committee.

I was able to cover the waterfront of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy because all of those issues hit us on the Deputies Committee. Then I kept [Albright] fully advised when she arrived for Principals Committee meetings—I would sit behind her in those meetings.  You can imagine the hundreds and hundreds of times I was in the Situation Room during that four-year period, sometimes it would be three or four times a week.  She also was delegating to me much of the war crimes work, which was swamping us with the Balkans and then Rwanda. What I talk about in the book is that slice of my work with war crimes, which was substantial and, in the second term when she became secretary of state, I became ambassador-at-large for war crimes and it became a full time job.

Did you take on war crimes as an issue yourself or was that assigned to you?

It was a little bit of everything. Remember, we didn’t have anyone with that kind of designation in the U.S. government and yet we were grappling with these issues in real time, and someone had to take control of it. Madeleine Albright was clearly the leader, but she had a big job to do as ambassador to the United Nations, and good leaders know how to delegate. She delegated the hard, daily, hourly work on it to myself, and that meant running endless tracks in Washington on these issues and then of course dealing with the tribunals themselves once they were built, and all the judges and prosecutors, and I was always on the phone with all these people trying to organize U.S. support and assistance, and galvanize our diplomatic pressure on every government to cooperate with the tribunals.

All of this took an enormous amount of time and effort and that’s what I was delegated to do in the first term. And we really felt that this had become a full-time endeavor and it was important to have an envoy on top of it at all times, and that’s why the proposal emerged so quickly in the second term to actually create a new ambassadorship to address the incidents.

Did the position continue after your service ended in 2001?

Yes it did, and it was something I negotiated myself with Colin Powell who was coming in as secretary of state to George W. Bush. I strongly encouraged him to keep the position because it was needed. Other ambassadorships were cast aside with the change of administration, but Colin Powell kept the ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, and it was the same throughout the George W. Bush administration and now into the Obama administration. I’ve had three successors in the ambassadorship.

Thank you for explaining your role in such detail. To add historical context, how did the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals influence your thinking on the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and other tribunals?

We were on terra nova in 1993 in terms of how to address the issue of accountability for atrocities in the Balkans. There was no international criminal court of any character, and none had existed since the international military tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II. We had to figure out how to build a court if we did this. Would we try to negotiate a treaty among nations to build an international criminal court? That would take years. Would we gear up a national court in the Balkans to take this on? The region was aflame. There was no security and it was impossible to conceive of a national court.

We did look back to Nuremberg and Tokyo and the charters for those military tribunals, which provided a template to work from, but this was not going to be victors’ justice.  This had to be justice created by the international community to address the issue. 

We looked at the Security Council, where we have substantial power as a permanent member. That was also the very beginning of Ambassador Albright’s tenure at the U.N., and she was interested in making a mark early on. This was an opportunity to address a very serious problem in a way that would perhaps be acceptable to other members of the Security Council. We determined that there was authority under Article 41 of the U.N. Charter to take non-military measures to address threats to international peace and security like economic sanctions and diplomatic sanctions, etc. It doesn’t say anything about building a court, but we extrapolated from Article 41 the authority to build a criminal court to get on top of accountability and perhaps ultimately deter individuals who would now understand they were facing the risk of prosecution for pursuing their crimes.

We took a rather bold step in determining that the Security Council could be the body to create a criminal tribunal to address a threat to international peace and security with its authority under the Charter.

We took that direction and it unfolded very quickly. France was our leading partner on the Security Council who took the lead with us in pressing this issue forward. That resolution was adopted in late February 1993, and it was a preliminary step because it said that the secretary general should now draft a statute and bring it back to the Security Council to adopt a resolution that operationalizes the court. In May 1993, that statute was agreed to and the operational phase of the court began.

As you tried to put together this tribunal, you must have been very aware of concentration camps and other ongoing atrocities in the Balkans.

Yes, of course. We were extremely aware. The news about the detention camps in Bosnia came out in 1992 and that was a huge incentive to build the Yugoslav tribunal at the beginning. And the news of atrocities continued to unfold in 1993, 1994 and early 1995. 

I think the richness of the story is the reality that the Yugoslav tribunal was only one aspect of dealing with a situation of that character. It can’t be an instrument to literally bring war to an end. That’s not its purpose. The purpose of a tribunal is to adjudge crime and then render just punishment for it. It’s not literally an instrument of war fighting or war ending. But the other huge story of the Balkans in that period was failure of the U.S. government and the NATO countries to decide about how to most effectively address the military situation on the ground and bring the atrocities to an end. That was a failure of policymaking.

When I first wrote this book, it clocked in at about 250,000 words.  I sent it to the publisher, Princeton University Press, and got back a nice email saying “Thank you so very much. We’ve been looking forward to this, and over the next couple months we’ll be looking forward as well to your cutting of sixty thousand words.” Part of those sixty thousand words was the story of what happened in 1993, 1994, and early 1995 in the decision making on the use of force in Bosnia. I’ll probably have a second book that resurrects those words and conveys that story. It’s not directly related to the tribunal but rather it’s what was happening in the Balkans and why it took so long to bring the conflict to an end, particularly in light of all the atrocities that were occurring. And that is a story that needs to be told.

I’ll look forward to that book. You capture the difficulty the administration faced in grappling with the ongoing violence in the Balkans as you tried to create a tribunal to deal with the leading war criminals. You must have incredible patience.

Yes. I think everyone who’s involved in this business, and there are thousands now who have intersected with the war crimes tribunals professionally—judges, prosecutors, defense counsel, interns, the whole bureaucracy around international justice—would say that the first thing you have to have is patience, but you also need perseverance because ultimately justice can achieve its objective in most cases, but it takes a long time. 

This is part of the frustration of many with the tribunals. They ask why aren’t these trials faster? What don’t they occur more quickly? Why does it take so many years to reach final judgment? There are very clear reasons for that. These are atrocity crimes of great magnitude with thousands upon thousands of victims. The evidence required to actually bring political and military leaders to justice is very difficult to acquire and you need a lot of it to persuade the judges that a particular leader orchestrated the commission of these atrocity crimes, as opposed to being rogue military commanders in the field or soldiers gone berserk, etc. So those are very difficult trials—not a felony with a single murder, but a mass felony of thousands of murders. And defense counsel are very good at insisting on all due process protections for their defendants, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt of the evidence against their clients. That’s a very long process, and you have to be patient.

As you were dealing with the violence in the Balkans, the genocide in Rwanda began in earnest in April 1994 as the Hutu majority began a campaign of extermination against the Tutsis. How aware were you of the mass killings there at that time?

What we were aware of were isolated attacks against the Tutsis, where you’d see one hundred or two hundred Tutsis killed sporadically in January, February, and March 1994.  When that happened—particularly back then when we didn’t have two decades of experience with reaction to atrocities—it was notable but it was not as though we were smart enough to see that those [killings] were clear signals of preemptive strikes that would culminate in a genocidal surge in April. We didn’t have that foresight.

In retrospect, a lot of people criticize us for not having a better understanding of what these strands of information really meant and not connecting the dots correctly. A lot of that criticism is valid and I write about that. We missed that mosaic of evidence that we should have been far more focused on.

As I write in the book, we kept looking at the situation in Rwanda as it unfolded in a conventional sense when we should have been thinking unconventionally. In other words, conventional in the context of Rwanda was the Arusha Peace Process between rebel Rwandan Tutsis who were camped out on the border of Uganda and the Hutu government. It was anticipated that this peace process would achieve some accommodation between the two groups. When you have that mode of thinking and you see violence in Rwanda in the run up to genocide, your instincts as a diplomat in the State Department—and this is what happened—is to say let’s put that in the framework of the Arusha Peace Process and see if we can get them back to the table to talk with each other—to diplomatically intervene to bring an end to the killing. 

The State Department will always think that way, and it has to be more sensitive to the character of the evidence when it's building and the fact that you might have to take some extraordinary steps to insure that atrocities do not break out. We made a terrible mistake in not bringing all that information together more coherently and understanding its significance at the time.

The photo on the cover of the book shows you walking in a cemetery in Rwanda. Although you don’t dwell on the explicit nature of the atrocities, you write very movingly of what you saw in the aftermath of major atrocities. You describe survivors in Rwanda and refugees in Kosovo and other nations you visited. In Sierra Leone you met victims of terrible mutilation, including Nancy, a mute teenager who survived blinding with molten plastic and brutal sexual assault. You’ve witnessed terrible suffering. Can you talk about how these horrific atrocities have affected you?

The first thing is that the more you’re exposed to this horror, frankly, in the human experience—at least in my case—the more you become determined to persevere. In other words, there’s no way you can walk way from it after a while. You have to keep walking right into it because you know it’s there and you feel guilty if you’re not addressing it. I think this is a feeling that so many humanitarian workers and doctors in the field have in their lives. It’s not a question of getting hooked, but more that you’re compelled not to ignore it any more. That’s really what happened. For example, if you suddenly become aware there’s an atrocity, you want to be there as soon as possible. You know you’re going to witness the horror of it, but you also know you’re there to get something done in response to it. That tends to build upon itself.

The book only scratches the surface of various stories of my encounters with atrocities, and I did that purposely. I didn’t want the book to be one atrocity after another that frankly might shock the reader into putting the book down. I just wanted to give snapshots of what I witnessed, and then focus the book on the diplomatic efforts to build the war crimes tribunals in response to these atrocities, as well as present the inside view of what the U.S. government did during these atrocities—which I am able to offer—and, of course, the chapter “Unbearable Timidity,” addresses the futile five-year effort to capture indicted fugitives Karadzic and Mladic in the Balkans. Those stories are more readable for the general public and occasionally tell them what it was like in the atrocity zones.

I don’t think I have a single description in the book of what it’s like day after day to stand at mass graves exhumations and watching forensic experts pull one tattered body after another out of the earth, but I spent a lot of my time at mass graves that were being exhumed in evidence collecting for the tribunals. You never get those images or even the smell of it out of your system. You get to a point, as I write, that you almost get used to seeing the remains of adults who had become victims of atrocities, but it’s almost impossible to get used to seeing children who have suffered this kind of violence.

I admire your persistence in the face of this overwhelming horror. You also vividly capture the frustration of trying to establish tribunals as parties argue about minute details seemingly without much consideration of the victims. For example, in the case of Cambodia—where you tried to set up a tribunal for the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975 to 1979—you detail failed effort after failed effort to reach agreement on how to try these cases, and you reflect on whether the parties to your talks really cared about the 1.7 million people who were killed.

That’s about keeping your eye on the target during the entire exercise. The reason you’re doing this is not to satisfy a personal agenda or some ideal vision of justice. It’s rather to achieve what I call credible justice, which is not necessarily ideal justice, because how can you possibly walk away from 1.7 million victims and say "this is too hard" or "I can’t get exactly what I want." You just can’t do that. You have to stick with it. The victims deserve that, and that was particularly true with Cambodia.

You were also a lead architect of the International Criminal Court as a representative of the United States. Historically, it seems there’s an American tendency to resist international agreements—American exceptionalism. Can you talk about your efforts to establish an international tribunal in the face of this American predisposition?

Having launched into so much work and dedication on building the Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals, it was only natural for the Clinton administration to take a very deep interest in the emerging proposal for a permanent international criminal court, which had been working its way through the International Law Commission of the United Nations in 1993 and 1994. It emerged from that work of experts, and in 1995 the draft text of the statute was put on the table for negotiations among governments at the United Nations. 

There was a natural flow of events. The Security Council began to experience tribunal fatigue and it was not plausible for the Security Council to create tribunals every time an atrocity occurred. That’s very costly and very inefficient and time consuming. There was a growing feeling that we needed a permanent international criminal court that would be cost efficient and would take on situations that would erupt in the future. We were quite enthused to be part of that process and frankly to lead the negotiations in that process, so I became deeply invested in it.  

As I write in the book, if you’re in the administration and you step up to the plate to take the lead on this kind of issue, you’re doing so because the chances of failure are high—you want to take that risk to your career—but I took it with the full support of Dr. Albright, and I just kept running with it until my very last day in government. 

On six occasions, President Clinton stated that he supported the creation of a permanent international criminal court by the end of the twentieth century. He put his effort behind it. As a consequence, I was delegated to that task and, all the way to the end in 2001 with the change of administrations, I led the U.S. delegation to negotiate and create this international criminal court.

As you noted, we labored under this notion of exceptionalism, which I think people out there learned more about in a very political way during the last presidential campaign when certain candidates made a big deal out of the United States being an exceptional nation. In the current presidential campaign, too, you hear certain candidates emphasize that point.

The problem is you have to sit back and ask what best advances U.S. interests. Is it to go out and state that you’re so exceptional that you need a lot of exceptions while other nations subject themselves to the terms of responsibilities and obligations and liabilities for commission of these atrocity crimes? Is that how you’re going to best advance the U.S. interests? 

As my book explains, that's a counterproductive strategy. If we trumpet our exceptionalism, other nations will resist that. They will isolate us and defeat us in negotiations. It's not really the smartest strategy to take. It’s a self-gratifying political dialogue here in the United States that makes us feel good that somehow we’re exceptional. But frankly, for other countries, we need to achieve and protect our interests in a smarter and more sophisticated way.

That strategy backfired and it truly hurt us on the International Criminal Court negotiations. After all, as a diplomat I have to act under instructions, and my instructions were to find a way to build this court that essentially immunized the United States from it. Imagine how fun that became when I went into a negotiation. Everyone else is subjected to the jurisdiction of the court but somehow the United States is not. And, by the way, do everything we want you to do in the treaty.

The book tries to describe that paradoxical path. Ultimately, I was able to sign personally the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court on December 31, 2000. Much has been distorted about that event and what President Clinton’s intentions were with the signing of the treaty, recognizing there would be a long-term venture ahead of us to ever achieve ratification of the treaty because of the nature of the U.S. Senate and what the Senate usually requires in ratifying treaties. It’s a story that takes three chapters in the book and I hope I provide an interesting road map for the reader on how one dips one’s toes into these issues and then dives in and then tries to swim and ultimately figure out how to get to the end of the race and to the end of the pool. And that’s the story of part of those negotiations on the International Criminal Court.

I think many people are confused about how the International Criminal Court works and what would happen if we ratified it and became a party. There are questions about how jurisdiction is triggered and whether the court could, for example, indict Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld for the crime of aggression in Iraq or for violating treaties on torture, or indict U.S. troops for alleged war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, or indict U.S. leaders [like President Obama] for drone attacks that resulted in civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

First of all, the United States is not a state party to the Rome Statute. Therefore, it’s much more difficult for the court to achieve jurisdiction over those types of actions. It’s not impossible, but it’s much more difficult. 

If we were a state party to the Rome Statute, it is true that the United States would be held to the standards of compliance with atrocity law and international law that is demanded by the Rome Statute. The Rome Statute also strips any official immunity from any political or military leader with respect to the court. When a state ratifies the Rome Statute, it agrees that there will be no official immunity for presidents or prime ministers or secretaries of defense or any other leader. And 120 nations, including all of America’s allies other than Turkey and Israel, have done that. That’s something you buy into and, as a champion of the rule of law, that’s something United States should buy into.         

It’s an odd phenomenon that we appear to be so intimidated by the prospect of criminalizing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes that we remain outside of the court. There’s a great fear that somehow we’ll be subject to politically motivated prosecutions by the court. We dealt with that subject endlessly during the negotiations. Our job was to build necessary safeguards into the treaty so that that issue could be checked and eliminated if it ever arose, and those safeguards are in the Rome Statute. 

On the last day of the Rome Conference in 1998, which concluded the drafting of the basic documents of the Rome Statute, we had not achieved the final text that we wanted and we were going to oppose the final text. But my colleague from France, Marc de Brichambaut, walked into my room in Rome and said that “Tomorrow France will sign the Rome Statute and thus be one of the first signatories of the Rome Statute.” He said “The reason we are going to do that is because we are absolutely convinced that no Frenchman will ever appear before the International Criminal Court even though we’re very active in Africa and elsewhere. And the reason,” he said, “is because we will exercise every single safeguard that’s in the Rome Statute. We’re going to modernize our criminal code and our military justice code and we’re even going to insure that our domestic laws do not immunize our leaders from the commission of atrocity crimes. We’re going to do everything so that if any question is ever raised about a Frenchman, our courts will deal with it, not the ICC. We’ll empower ourselves to deal with it, and if we deal with it, one of the safeguards in the treaty is that the ICC will then have to back off.”

I hope that at some point the United States has the power to do the same for us. But one important point is that you cannot legislate or believe that somehow under some argument of exceptionalism that the United States can or should immunize itself against accountability for the commission of these atrocity crimes or, in other words, empower the president or the military to commit these atrocity crimes. We don’t have the right to think we can commit these crimes. It’s a no-brainer. If you’re a real American, you’d say, "of course not."

If our leaders plan genocide or plan crimes against humanity or plan massive war crimes, they must be brought to justice and, quite frankly, much of our federal criminal code and the Code of Military Justice demand that. The issue is are we enforcing them or are we passing legislation such as the Military Commissions Act in 2006 that literally immunizes our officials from prosecution for crimes, such as alleged torture in the so-called “war on terror”?

Either we have to step up to the plate on the rule of law, or we have to re-examine what this country really stands for.

Did the Military Commissions Act of 2006 gut the War Crimes Act of 1996?

It did not gut it but it fundamentally transformed it so that officials cannot be prosecuted for certain crimes committed only between 1997 and 2006, and it made some unfortunate revisions to the types of crimes covered by the War Crimes Act of 1996 in terms of what can be prosecuted. It’s important to note that, in transforming the War Crimes Act of 1996, the new law became more of an instrument in shielding the U.S. military during the so-called war on terror rather than holding the U.S. military to the highest standards of compliance with international criminal law.

After you left government service in 2001, didn’t Republican Senator Jesse Helms propose removal of your signature from the Rome Statute?

Yes. After I signed the Rome Statute on December 31, 2000, it angered Senator Helms greatly. He claimed that the new George W. Bush Administration should go to New York and erase my signature from the treaty. They actually sought to do so in May 2002 with a letter to the U.N. Secretary-General saying that the United States would no longer undertake any of the responsibilities of a signatory state to the Rome Statute, meaning that the United States could go out and start to undermine and oppose it, which is what they did immediately thereafter. And yet, my signature is still there. A new letter from the Obama administration to the U.N. could state that the United States resumed its responsibilities as a signatory state to the Rome Statute, meaning that we were not going to undermine it or threaten states that joined this treaty with cut off of military and economic aid, as we did during the Bush administration.

I will say that the Obama administration has had a very constructive and cooperative relationship with the ICC—so much so that one could almost say today that the United States holds de facto membership with the ICC because in so many ways, the United States is now advancing ICC objectives through its actions, whether with leadership in the Security Council in making sure that situations such as Libya get referred to the ICC, or sending one hundred military trainers to Uganda in October 2011 with the express purpose of tracking down, arresting and flying to The Hague the four senior indicted fugitives of the Lord’s Resistance Army who need to stand trial before the ICC. 

We’re doing a lot now, but we’re still far removed from attracting enough support in the U.S. Senate to ratify the Rome Statute. And also, to ratify it, we would need to pass implementing legislation, and that, of course, requires the cooperation of the House of Representatives, and if that’s totally controlled by the Republican majority it’s highly unlikely that implementing legislation will be adopted.

I read that the Obama Administration also established an Atrocities Prevention Board.  Are you involved with this board or other administration efforts?

Yes. I’ve been involved with the work of the Atrocities Prevention Board but only as an outsider. I ran a meeting in October where we brought the relevant government officials together to talk it through, and I delivered a report after that. 

Thankfully, the Atrocity Prevention Board is a kind of follow-on to the Atrocities Prevention Interagency Working Group that I chaired in 1999 and 2000. It was an interagency effort to get on top of atrocities before they happened or at least as they immediately happened and better organize decision making within the U.S. government.  That experience, which was totally abandoned during the Bush administration, was resurrected in the Obama administration.

I think in a very short time you’ll see the announcement of the creation of the Atrocities Prevention Board, which is designed to develop much greater efficiency in government as well as in our decision making with foreign governments in addressing atrocities as they emerge. The example today would be how an Atrocities Prevention Board would be convened to address the situation that is unfolding in Syria.

What would you like to see happen with the violent and unstable situation in Syria now? 

I would prefer that the Security Council—now that we have the dilemma of the Russian and Chinese veto there—persuade [Russia and China] to abstain on a very clean resolution that would refer Syria to the International Criminal Court. The level of atrocity crime is now so obvious that it begs for proper investigation. I would hope for at least that clean resolution. That would be one step, but there are other ideas on Syria, and fortunately the Arab League is becoming a partner in this with the international community. The General Assembly itself, as we’ve never seen before, is acting in unison to address the kind of atrocities as we’ve seen in Syria.

For one, Prof. John Yoo, a former White House counsel in the Bush Administration, has been a critic of the ICC and argues, I believe, that only military intervention and not the court can end atrocities. As you point out, the court is not designed to deter crime but to prosecute it. Given that, it does seem that atrocities have abated in some situations as in Kosovo in 1999, when hostilities ceased shortly after the arrest of accused perpetrator Slobodan Milosevic. 

It is a misunderstanding of the role of the criminal court that Prof. Yoo posits—that somehow the criminal court is to defeat armies and defeat that passions of power hungry leaders, and that’s the burden of these tribunals. That is not what they are built for. They are criminal courts. In any national system like the United States, there are criminal courts that investigate crimes and bring perpetrators to justice. Does that mean that the criminal courts of the United States have ended crime in our time? No, of course not, but it’s a process you need for some level of justice and not impunity for these crimes. 

The better view is to say in ten or twenty or thirty years from now, what will the respect for the rule of law be in Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Rwanda, Congo, or Uganda? It’s not the short-term impact of these tribunals on the current generation, the hate-filled sectors of society that are battling it out. We need to bring them to justice because that’s what the rule of law is all about. You can’t argue that they should simply get away with this.

The real deterrent impact is a generational one. If you look at the societies of Germany and Japan today I think you have to conclude that, while they both unleashed World War II on the world, they were subjected to the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, and those tribunals left a lasting legacy on those societies. It was not popular at the time but I think later generations have benefitted enormously from the fact that those tribunals were convened and actually brought leaders to justice. That’s the same kind of impact that you’ll see with these tribunals. 

There’s also recent academic work demonstrating that, over the last thirty years, in societies where there have been human rights prosecutions at the national level or at the international level through these tribunals, you see empirically a diminishment of human rights abuses in those societies and even in neighboring societies. So the empirical work demonstrates that, over the long term, there can be a significant impact on the protection of human rights in these societies, but it’s not an instant one.

I strongly disagree with Prof. Yoo’s analysis that somehow we operate under the assumption that building these tribunals is the magical formula for defeating terrorism.  He tries to defend his own conduct by using this argument as a straw man, saying there has to be a military response—these tribunals don’t get the work done. It’s a total misunderstanding of what this process is all about.

Robin Lindley is a Seattle writer and attorney. He contributes to the History News Network, Crosscut, Real Change and other publications on history, law, politics, the media, medicine, the arts and other topics. He is a former chair of the World Peace through Law Section of the Washington State Bar Association and has worked as an attorney for federal agencies and a congressional investigating committee.