Genocide Never Sleeps
Living Law at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

This is the first comprehensive ethnographic account of an international criminal court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Nigel Eltringham (Author)

9781108707398, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 July 2021

234 pages, 10 b/w illus.
22.7 x 15.1 x 1.3 cm, 0.355 kg

'Overall, in full reverence to the old anthropological adage of making the familiar strange, Eltringham does a superb job of turning the site of international tribunals into an unfamiliar new terrain with fascinating insights to debate for anthropologists and legal scholars alike.' Senem Kaptan, Allegra Laboratory

Accounts of international criminal courts have tended to consist of reflections on abstract legal texts, on judgements and trial transcripts. Genocide Never Sleeps, based on ethnographic research at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), provides an alternative account, describing a messy, flawed human process in which legal practitioners faced with novel challenges sought to reconfigure long-standing habits and opinions while maintaining a commitment to 'justice'. From the challenges of simultaneous translation to collaborating with colleagues from different legal traditions, legal practitioners were forced to scrutinise that which normally remains assumed in domestic law. By providing an account of this process, Genocide Never Sleeps not only provides a unique insight into the exceptional nature of the ad hoc, improvised ICTR and the day-to-day practice of international criminal justice, but also holds up for fresh inspection much that is naturalised and assumed in unexceptional, domestic legal processes.

Introduction: judging the crime of crimes
1. 'When we walk out
what was it all about?'
2. 'Watching the fish in the goldfish bowl'
3. 'Who the hell cares how things are done in the old country'
4. 'They don't say what they mean or mean what they say'
5. 'We are not a truth commission'
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: International courts & procedures [LBHG], International human rights law [LBBR], International law [LB]