Given the myriad of human rights abuses that occur globally and daily, why are some nations on the receiving end of a substantial amount of international opprobrium, while others receive far less attention and condemnation? The authors contend that the increasing presence of human rights organizations in such states is the critical link between the local and the international. Increases in the number of such groups contributes significantly to the generation of Amnesty International urgent actions, one of the most-often-utilized tools in naming and shaming campaigns against human rights abusing regimes. The authors find strong support for nearly all their hypotheses.

Internationalised courts are now fi rmly part of the international criminal landscape, having been established when post-confl ict national systems were unable to try the perpetrators of mass atrocities, or when international contribution was deemed warranted. Internationalised courts have been established in Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. One of the shared characteristics of these courts is that they necessarily interact with the national courts in their countries of operation; some more successfully than others. In some cases, national courts have signifi cantly hindered the work of the internationalised court. Given that the expense of the ad hoc tribunals and the complementarity regime of the ICC mean that internationalised courts are likely to be the forum of choice in many post-confl ict states, an examination of how these courts can best manage relationships with national courts is timely.

This book demonstrates how, after many years of inactivity after the World War II tribunals, judges at the Yugoslav, Rwanda and Sierra Leone tribunals, and to a lesser extent the International Criminal Court, have seized the opportunity to develop international law on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Meernik and Aloisi argue that judges are motivated by a concern for human rights protection and the legacy of international criminal justice. They have progressively expanded the reach of international law to protect human rights and have used the power of their own words to condemn human rights atrocities. Judges have sentenced the guilty to lengthy and predictable terms in prison to provide justice, deterrence of future violations and even to advance peace and reconciliation. On judgment day, we show that judges have sought to enhance the power of international justice.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has delivered judgments adjudicating some of the most heinous crimes committed in the Balkans. As the Tribunal’s work comes to an end, judges leave behind a ‘memorial of words’ providing a vivid description of events and sites of atrocities. However, today local authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) use the same places where crimes were committed as a political tool of denial and battleground of ethnic divisions. This chapter assesses the tensions between the truth recounted by the ICTY and the construction of the local collective memory through an analysis of how the sites of atrocities are being used. This chapter argues that, while international justice offers some resolution to a post-war divided society, a full reconciliation is only possible when the communities acknowledge the occurrence of atrocities and the right of victims to visit these places to mourn and remember.

The reasons behind states' ratification of international human rights agreements have been the object of extensive investigations. However, it has also been proven that states' initial commitment to human rights treaties does not necessarily lead to improved human rights standards. Indeed, a systematic analysis of the annual reports and concluding observations of the committees overseeing compliance with the international human rights instruments shows that, often, states members fall under the scrutiny of the UN treaty based bodies for not abiding by the terms of the agreements. The author contends that, although ratification of human rights treaties is an important component of compliance with human rights, vague international human rights standards and a weak international enforcement system, create meaningless commitments, only enforceable by internationally aligned national legislation. This study proposes a systematic analysis of the UN human rights treaties committees' reports and concluding observations to understand what happens within the domestic legislation once states become members of international human rights agreements.