What can be done if the perpetrators are dead or protected by impunity laws? Victim-driven lessons toward a decolonial turn in international criminal justice

• In Event: Victimhood in Transitional Justice (ECACTJ Working Group)

Abstract

This article builds on TWAIL and Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law scholarship to contribute to the decolonial turn in international criminal justice. To do so, this empirically grounded article examines the decolonial critique of international criminal justice and uses the case of Argentina to show how victims' organisations have developed original justice-related initiatives ('escraches', truth trials, people's tribunals) to address international crimes, which can complement traditional forms of international criminal justice. These initiatives can function as decolonial tools in three ways: (i). to address critical shortcomings of Northern-dominated international criminal law, including victim participation, costs, selectivity and formalistic operation, and its primarily punitive features; (ii). to address colonial crimes even though the perpetrators are dead; and (iii). to open up the international criminal law debate to the voices and experiences of victims, what we will call the 'demographic South', from Argentina, a country in the global South.

Author

• Valeria E Vegh Weis, Konstanz University