Two Steps Forward, One Step Back






How do we affect perceptions? These studies reach some common conclusions. Amongst them is the importance of outreach. This is a frequent general recommendation in international criminal law studies, so bears further unpacking to render it useful. Public information is only one part of the equation, as are efforts to raise the public profile of international justice efforts. Public information can be the equivalent of shouting (or whispering) into the void. Outreach, by contrast, is a conversation, and one that must be agile and brave enough to consider responses (positive and negative), understand their cultural grounding, and respond with clarifications and further information that will help ensure that the court or tribunal concerned is truly understood.

Outreach must be able to withstand sustained propaganda campaigns, and to tackle the phenomenon of the ‘noble cause’, the fact that no perpetrator believes they are committing crimes, but rather serving their country and their community through their actions. Outreach must be able to honestly grapple with why people may view the tribunal or court as selective or illegitimate without going on the defensive. Outreach must seek to identify when short-term, often ephemeral deterrent effects are achieved, and hand-in-hand with cooperation work, must make maintaining and building on those effects for the long-term a key priority. 

Maintaining this conversation about justice, through outreach, is one part of building a culture of accountability. Members of the international community must maintain focus on justice and the rule of law in the long-term, and continue building the partnerships needed to turn promises of help into reality if they want to achieve deterrence in the long-term. Otherwise, deterrence will remain elusive or even impossible when the conditions driving the commission of serious crimes are more entrenched and long-standing than the anti-impunity efforts arrayed against them. Simply put, if those committing crimes are more dedicated to their endeavors than those who wish to prevent them, crimes will continue to be committed, and we will all feel the effects.

It is worth noting in this context that factors affecting deterrence and perceptions come not only from criminal law (either national or international) but also from other relevant fields, in particular conflict prevention and human rights. They are both court-based and contextual. Further academic work analyzing the origins and commonality of such factors has been conducted through Leiden University and should be available fairly soon. It is hoped that studies such as these can galvanize action across the dividing lines of different fields so that we can effectively address together the global challenges that most concern us, in particular how to help ensure both global accountability and meaningful, sustainable peace. The full deterrence volume is available for free on the Nuremberg Academy’s website here.


Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo



Connecting to %s