What Have the International Criminal Tribunals Accomplished?

        Researchers from the Department of Criminal Law, Tilburg University, Netherlands and the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, VU University Amsterdam have published their compilation of statistics from the international criminal tribunals in “Sixty-Five Years of  International Criminal Justice: The Facts and Figures,” which appears in the current issue of the International Criminal Law Review (Volume 13, 2013: Special Issue). Alette Smeulers, Barbora Hola, and Tom van den Berg  reviewed the proceedings of the nine international criminal tribunals: The International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg), the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Special Tribunal for Lebanon, and the Special Panels of DIli (East Timor). They found that 172 cases have been concluded in which 250 judges and 23 chief prosecutors have participated. In all, there were 745 indicted suspects,  of which 356 were  tried and 281 convicted. Currently there are 34 suspects on trial and 22 are still at large. The largest percentage of those convicted  came from Asia (110 out of 281, or 39%), while 36% of the European perpetrators were convicted and 25% of the African (p.33).

The Yale Law Library strives to collect a comprehensive set of commentaries and doctrinal works relating to these trials, and where possible the travaux preparatoires of thestatutes creating them.

                                                                                                                                                     Dan Wade