LCIL Friday Lecture: 'A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing? Transitional Justice and the Effacement of State Accountability for International Crimes'

Professor Laurel E. Fletcher is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law where she directs the International Human Rights Law Clinic. Her areas of interest include international criminal law, international human rights, and transitional justice. She has conducted empirical studies on the impacts of mass violence on communities. Professor Fletcher has two decades of experience advising nongovernmental organizations and civil society groups on legal strategies to pursue justice for victims of international crimes. She has advocated on behalf of victims of conflict before international criminal tribunals and human rights mechanisms. Professor Fletcher’s recent works include Writing Transitional Justice: An Empirical Evaluation of Transitional Justice Scholarship in Academic Journals, 7 J.HUM. RTS. PRACTICE 177 (2015) (with Harvey M. Weinstein). She has just completed a five-year term as co-EIC of the International Journal of Transitional Justice. She received her undergraduate degree from Brandeis University, is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, and clerked for the Hon. Charles A. Legge, U.S. District Court.

Lecture summary: If international atrocity crimes are acts so egregious that their impunity cannot be legally tolerated, why don’t we punish states that commit them? The rise of international criminal law is celebrated as an achievement of the international rule of law, yet its advance effectively may come at the expense of holding states accountable for their role in mass violence. Transitional justice has emerged as the dominant normative framework for how the international community responds to mass violence. Liberalism strongly influences transitional justice, which has produced individual criminal accountability as the desired form of legal accountability for atrocities. Transitional justice rejects punishing states for atrocities as illiberal (collective punishment) and illegitimate (lack of positive law). In fact, transitional justice theorization of justice largely ignores legal accountability for states. Without legal accountability, states enjoy moral and legal impunity for their crimes. States escape their legal obligations to repair the injury they cause and to institute reforms that secure a fuller measure of justice and peace. In her talk, Professor Fletcher will discuss her recent research examining how international law and transitional justice have developed conceptually to effectively prevent legal accountability for states that commit atrocity crimes and argue that a new politics of transitional justice is necessary to harness the productive potential of state legal accountability to achieve a fuller measure of international justice. This work will be published in the Fordham International Law Journal.

Lauterpacht Centre - Term Lecture Programme and Information »

Numbers are limited so please arrive early to avoid disappointment. Please note the lecture programme is subject to revision without notice.