Lisa Laplante, in response to last month’s “question of the month,” priorities for the next president, blogged about the need provide accountability for torture.  I noticed that in her comments on a recent post on Opinio Juris, she wrote that “[t]he issue of amnesty could become one of the most contentious” in the debate about Bush Adminstration accountability for torture and other human rights violations.  She also linked to her timely article, “Outlawing Amnesty:  The Return of Criminal Justice in Transitional Justice Schemes,” which 

discusses the Barrios Altos case, a seminal decision issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2001, that declared the amnesty laws promulgated in 1995 by former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori to be contrary to international law. Recent scholarship has ignored this decision, or otherwise interpreted it overly narrowly, despite its potentially sweeping impact on the field of transitional justice. Thus, this article responds by offering a more in-depth understanding of the Barrios Altos decision in order to inform the ongoing academic debates on the evolving doctrine on amnesty in transitional justice schemes. It also shares the particular case study of Peru to show how international law directly impacts national transitional justice experiences. This article suggests that the truth v. justice dilemma may no longer exist: instead, criminal justice must be done.

The article is now on my reading list.  (The shorter one, the one with things I will probably actually get around to reading.)

I attended a conference at NYU two weeks ago as part of NYU’s Journal of International Law & Politics symposium on the “Normalization of Adjudication in Complex International Governance Regimes.” Invited to bring a little dispute resolution to this otherwise complete adjudicatory focus, it was very interesting to think about what the “normalization” of international courts and decisions might mean for dispute resolution. I came to this conference with some background in writing on international trade dispute resolution regarding the evolution of international dispute resolution and the importance of individual representation in courts, but had left much of this behind to focus on dispute resolution more broadly. More recently, I have had the opportunity to think about a number of interesting co-existing features in the development of international law and dispute resolution. First, as I wrote about last year, it is a striking coincidence that as we worry about the “vanishing trial” in the U.S., the international scene has been exploding with new courts (WTO, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, etc.) and expanded case loads even for longer-standing courts (the ICJ, ECJ, ECHR, IACHR, etc.). This does not even include the multitude of other processes designed to deal with global conflict, including truth and reconciliations commissions like those in South Africa and in many South American countries. So, last spring at PON’s dispute system design symposium, I was able to broaden my perspective and think about the concerns and challenges faced by DSD when creating systems to deal with human rights conflicts and, what has been called, transitional justice situations. (Click here to see my draft article on this entitled Dispute System Design and Transitional Justice.)

My next step, the paper for this NYU symposium, will now look forward to where we go from here.