Guilty Pleas in International Criminal Law: Constructing a Restorative Justice Approach

BOOK EPIGRAPHS: Prosecutor v. Plavšić, Case No. IT-00-39&40/1-S, Prosecution’s Brief on the Sentencing of Biljana Plavšić (Nov. 25, 2002) Daria Sito-Sucic, Muslim Victims Outraged, Say Plavšić Sentence Low, REUTERS, Feb. 27, 2003.

1. The ICTY’s first prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, hailed the tribunals as “a tremendous and exciting step forward,” Richard Goldstone, Conference Luncheon Address, 7 TRANSNAT’l L. & CONTEMP. PROBS. 1, 2 (1997), while Payam Akhavan described the establishment of the ICTY and ICTR as “an unprecedented institutional expression of the indivisibility of peace and respect for human rights” that “represents a radical departure from the traditional realpolitik paradigm which has so often and for so long ignored the victims of mass murder and legitimized the rule of tyrants in the name of promoting the purported summum bonum of stability.” Payam Akhavan, Justice and Reconciliation in the Great Lakes Region of Africa: The Contribution of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, 7 DUKE J. COMP. & INT’L L. 325, 327 (1997).

2. See, e.g., MICHAEL P. SCHARF, BALKAN JUSTICE (1997); Jose E. Alvarez, Rush to Closure: Lessons of the Tadić Judgment, 96 MICH. L. REV. 2031 (1998); Sanja Kutnjak Ivković, Justice by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 37 Stan. J. Int’l L. 255, 331 (2001) (describing the media frenzy at the opening of the Tadić trial); Kellye L. Fabian, Note and Comment, Proof and Consequences: An Analysis of the Tadić & Akayesu Trials, 49 DEPAUL L. REV. 981 (2000).

3. Allison Marston Danner, When Courts Make Law: How the International Criminal Tribunals Recast the Laws of War, 59 VAND. L. REV. 1, 25 (2006).

4. After less than a month in office, Argentine president Néstor Kirchner purged the military high command, announced a willingness to extradite human-rights offenders wanted in other countries, and called on the Argentine Supreme Court to declare amnesty laws and pardons unconstitutional. Larry Rohter, Now the Dirtiest of Wars

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