The role of the Prosecutor in investigating extraterritorial atrocity crimes

• In Event: Prosecuting atrocities – challenges of collecting, presenting and evaluating evidence in a cross-cultural setting

Abstract

During the 2010s, technological developments generated a surge of initiatives by non-official investigators, new institutions and transnational collaborations to document, investigate and share evidence of atrocity crimes. Their aim is “justice”, most often in the form of criminal accountability. Hence, the aspired end-users of this information are prosecutors. Yet, the myriad of actors and now terabytes of information that is generated creates a bottleneck at the level of the prosecutor’s offices, that do not have the capacity to analyse all information collected everywhere by everyone, cannot always accept information (for instance due to lack of jurisdiction when there is no suspect on their territory), or share information with other prosecutorial offices (for instance due to procedural or logistical hurdles). However, the prosecutor’s role is surprisingly undertheorized and ambivalent: having to uphold fundamental legal principles while straddling the lines between magistrate and civil servant; representing the public or the victim; truth-finding and crime-fighting. This is highlighted in the domestic prosecution of extraterritorial atrocity crimes, given the mismatch between the number of potential cases across the world’s many conflicts and serious human rights violations and available resources within domestic justice systems to allocate to extraterritorial atrocity crimes. This paper explores the prosecutor’s role in investigating extraterritorial atrocity crimes, with a particular focus on the contemporary challenges of emerging technologies and evidence overflow, complexities of transnational collaboration with myriad public/private actors in collecting/analysing evidence, and the importance of communicating justice to - foreign and large - afflicted societies and the world-at-large.

Author

• Marieke de Hoon, University of Amsterdam