28.10.08 - JUSTICE/BOOK - BOOK: VOYAGE TO COURTS OF INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE

Arusha, 28 October 2008 (FH) - Stephanie Maupas, correspondent in The Hague for the Hirondelle Agency and French daily newspaper Le Monde, has published a book entitled: "Judges, Executioners, Victims: Voyage to Courts of International Justice (Juges, Bourreaux, Victimes : Voyage dans les prétoires de la justice internationale)".

1 min 5Approximate reading time

She describes in the 170-page book, hearings ,difficulties of the judges, cynicism of the defendants and suffering of the witnesses and the victims are intermixed. No theory, no analysis, only facts. A true journalistic book.

Logically she mentions more on the courts of the ICTY than those of the ICTR. In connection with the ICC she says: "justice and peace do not dance on the same tempo. The diplomats aspire for peace. The prosecutors for justice. The former would like to know the immediate future. The latter sees the past".

Maupas does not have great memories of these first years as a witness of international justice in Arusha. But the description of the arrival of Romeo Dallaire as a witness at the ICTR, where he arrived... with a box of kleenex, was worth to be seen.

Before judiciously presenting parts of cases which show the complexity of the trials, she writes: justice (...) has neither reconciled the protagonists of the wars nor dissuaded the candidates to crime. It has not manage to stop a criminal red-handed committing a crime against humanity, not any more than it has made it possible to dismantle genocide in progress. However, whatever the manoeuvres of its detractors, the instrumentalization countries use, the line booed by holders of ethnic purification, it is feared".

"Judges, Executioners, Victims", Collection Frontières at Autrement publishing is sold for 17 Euros.

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