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2 Eyes on the ICC 17 (2005)
The ICC in Northern Uganda: Peace First, Justice Later?

handle is hein.journals/eyesicc2 and id is 19 raw text is: HE ICC IN NORTHERN UGANDA: PEACE FIRST, JUSTICE LATER? Pablo Castillo Diaz* I. INTRODUCTION A trial in the aftermath of mass atrocity, then, should mark an effort be- tween vengeance and forgiveness. It transfers the individual's desires for revenge to the state or official bodies. The transfer cools vengeance into retribution, slows judgment with procedure, and interrupts, with docu- ments, cross-examination, and the presumption of innocence, the vicious cycle of blame and feud. The trial itself steers clear of forgiveness, how- ever. It announces a demand not only for accountability and acknowledge- ment of harms done, but also for unflinching punishment.' Since the end of the Cold War, the proliferation of international criminal tri- bunals, humanitarian interventions, and the application of the principle of universal jurisdiction in various domestic courts, has shown that international criminal law is moving towards effective enforcement. Still a young institution, the International Criminal Court, created in Rome in 1998 and ratified by almost a hundred coun- tries, is expected to become the foundational stone of this development, and is al- ready the primary reference for those who believe that borders, states' sovereignty, and political expediency cannot shield the perpetrators of massive human rights violations from prosecution. It is widely acknowledged that the moral commitment to protect the most fun- damental human rights at a global scale trumps state sovereignty and the legal pil- lars that sustained classic international law. The disagreement lies on what is most conducive to peace and how the interests of the victims are best served. A range of options that include international, national, and hybrid courts, peace negotiations, amnesties, military operations, truth commissions and other traditional and local methods of reconciliation, encompass the alternatives that have been and are being employed in different troubled regions. As if they were contradictory rather than complementary, each situation presents us with the same dilemma between law and politics, peace and justice, retribution and restoration, vengeance and forgiveness. The Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court entered into force in July 2002, after being ratified by 60 countries, but became fully opera- tional in 2003. Since then, the Office of the Prosecution headed by Luis Moreno Ocampo has received the referral of four situations, pertaining to conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic, and, at the behest of the United Nations Security Council, Sudan. The International Criminal Court is currently conducting preliminary investigations in northern Uganda and in Ituri, a northeastern province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.2 The re- sults of these investigations and the subsequent trials will likely shed some light on Ph.D. Candidate at the Division of Global Affairs, Rutgers University. 1 MARTHA MINOw, BETWEEN VENGEANCE AND FORGIVENESS: FACING HISTORY AFTER GENOCIDE AND MASS VIOLENCE 26 (Beacon Press 1998). 2 See Int'l Crim. Ct., Situations and Cases, http://www.icc-cpi.int/cases.html.

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