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15 Crim. L.F. 1 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/crimlfm15 and id is 1 raw text is: WILLIAM A. SCHABAS INTRODUCTION Criminal justice for human rights abuses committed during periods of political repression or dictatorship is one of the great challenges to post-conflict societies. In many cases, there has been no justice at all. Sometimes serious political concerns that efforts at accountability might upset fragile peace settlements have militated in favour of no action and no accountability. In many cases, the outgoing tyrants have conditioned their departure upon a pledge that there be no prosecutions. But thinking on these issues has evolved considerably in recent years. Largely driven by the view that collective amnesia amounts to a violation of fundamental human rights, especially those of the victims of atrocities, attention has increasingly turned to the dynamics of post-conflict accountability. At the high end of the range, of course, sit the new international criminal justice institutions: the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the various hybrid tribunals in Kosovo, East Timor and Cambodia, and the new International Criminal Court. But in terms of sheer numbers, the most significant new institutions are truth and reconciliation commissions. Of vari- able architecture, depending upon the prerogatives of the society in question and the features of the past conflict, they have emerged as a highly popular mechanism within the toolbox of transitional justice. In some cases, the truth commission is held out as an alternative to criminal justice. Transitional states often may simply refuse to con- template the criminal justice option, and offer the truth commission as a modest alternative. In others, a dynamic is created between the truth commission process and criminal courts, whereby those who participate in the truth commission process are in some way sheltered from prosecution. But with the emergence of international criminal justice, either through dedicated institutions or the exercise of universal jurisdiction, it has become more difficult to adequately address the relationship between these accountability mechanisms. Even if truth commis- sions fit within some acceptable domestic compromise, they cannot Criminal Law Forum 15: 1-2, 2004. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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