Oldal 57 [57]
OCR
THE FORA FOR JUSTICE ACCOUNTABILITY OR ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE NAME OF PEACEBUILDING AND RECONCILIATION? It has been a common understanding that the international justice system has its roots in the 1474 Breisach trial, conducted in the aftermath of the atrocities committed during the siege of the city of Breisach in the Upper Rhine region. The punishment for committing “crimes against the laws of nature and God” was imposed by the ad hoc tribunal composed of 26 judges from various regional city-states on Peter Von Hagenbach, Burgundy’s Alsatian military commander.* This historical precedent signaled that bringing preparators of grave breaches amounting to international crimes to prosecution and punishment would become a key mandate of the modern, twenty-century established international courts and tribunals. Moreover, the unprecedented atrocities committed during World War II paved the way for establishing the duality of the state and individual responsibility for international crimes. The Nuremberg judgment and the Genocide Convention are cases at the point. However, the late1990s and the early 2000s attempts to connect international trials with restoring peace and achieving reconciliation between divided nations or ethnic groups have shown that the modern international criminal justice system has become more ambitious than the Nuremberg trial, on whose legacy it was built. Along with the legal, the non-legal purposes prominently figured in the missions of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and Special Court for Sierra Leone. What was put in their mandates, now mostly over, was not retribution itself, but an aim of holding individuals to account in an effort to promote peacebuilding and reconciliation.® There is a further twist here. Even though the ICTY and ICTR became revolutionary milestones of the international criminal justice, which speeded up the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Rome Statute spells out that the ICC is established to secure the punishment for the most serious crimes of concern to the international community, to put an end to impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes and thus to contribute to the prevention of such 3 Gregory S. Gordon, The Trial of Peter von Hagenbach: Reconciling History, Historiography and International Criminal Law, in Kevin Heller - Gerry Simpson (ed.), The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials, Oxford, OUP, 2013, 13-49. 4 The Judgment is rendered on 1 October 1946; The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was approved by General Assembly Resolution 260 A (III) of 9 December 1948; it entered into force on 12 January 1951. 5 Ruti Teitel, The Law and Politics of Contemporary Transitional Justice, Cornell International Law Journal 38 (2005), 837-862, 857. e 55 +
