In this seminar, Prof Mark Dumbl (Washington and Lee University) and Dr Rachel Killean (University of Sydney) will discuss their ongoing work on the afterlives of atrocity tribunals.

An international criminal tribunal is established to fanfare. Indictments are issued, trials held, judgements rendered, appeals exhausted, convicts sentenced. But all things must come to an end. And so it goes with tribunals for Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, and Kosovo. A small ceremony might mark the closure. But then what? Tribunal closure is treated like a technical footnote with little thought to the tribunal’s afterlife.

The afterlife of tribunals — their surviving commitments, responsibilities, and legacies — remains one of the most understudied and least understood aspects of the international justice project. And, yet, the process through which tribunals manage closure may prove crucial in shaping how tribunals convey long-term meaning for victims and societies emerging from conflict, how the conflict and accountability therefor is remembered, and for international criminal law as a discipline itself.