An important milestone was reached in October, when former Rwandan prime minister Jean Kambanda was sentenced on appeal to life in prison by the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for his role in the 1994 genocide. Kambanda is the first former head of government to be sentenced for genocide. A similar tribunal in The Hague for the former Yugoslavia has indicted, but not yet extradited and tried Slobodan Milosevic. The experience of these ad hoc tribunals has given new impetus to the quest for a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC). In 1998, 120 countries (with the United States opposed) voted to establish the ICC; its ratification is expected by 2002. As the international community moves toward global judicial remedies for crimes against humanity, governments and citizens are pursuing a panoply of methods to redress abuses of human rights: criminal trials and civil suits, joint U.N.-government tribunals; traditional village courts (in Rwanda), and truth and reconciliation commissions m

odeled on South Africa's. While there is an growing consensus that addressing past human-rights violations is a necessary step in the process of building reconciliation and peace, there is intense debate on how best to do it within the unique contexts of societies as diverse as Rwanda and Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia and Argentina, Indonesia and Peru. Yet the movement toward an ICC has already changed the climate of impunity by encouraging creative legal strategies to deny safe haven to dictators and war criminals and by acting as an incentive for governments to try the perpetrators of atrocities on their own soil, or face the specter of an international tribunal.

Margaret Bald

World Press Review on Line