Description
In The Justice Cascade Kathryn Sikkink traces the origins of the International Criminal Court to a revival of the Nuremburg/Tokyo legacy during the ‘third wave’ of democracy in Southern Europe. She, like most scholars, downplays the significance of a series of leftist attempts to revive Nuremburg using civil society tribunals. These began with the 1966 International War Crimes Tribunal (or ‘Russell Tribunal’) that prosecuted the war in Vietnam and continued thereafter, notably under the auspices of The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal. Many of the same personnel were simultaneously involved with unofficial international commissions of inquiry into war crimes committed in (inter alia) Southern Africa and Lebanon. For Sikkink these leftist initiatives were too tainted with revolutionary politics to have been an important factor in building the international rule of law. Yet such initiatives were in fact supported by a number of strikingly un-revolutionary jurists who appear to have seen them as a means of building pressure for permanent international justice institutions. This paper will evaluate the significance of these jurists’ campaigns.
