In 2017, nearly 25 years after its founding, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) officially completed its task of prosecuting atrocity crimes committed during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The tribunal’s mandate was to provide justice to the war’s victims and to help establish and maintain peace in the region. Did it achieve those objectives? The answer has important implications for international criminal accountability more broadly. Indeed, the ICTY has long been a focus of transitional justice scholars, particularly those seeking to understand the effects of international criminal prosecutions. In recent years scholars have begun applying sophisticated empirical methods to the question of impact assessment. James David Meernik’s and Kimi Lynn King’s Judging Justice: How Victim Witnesses Evaluate International Courts adds to this body of empirical transitional justice research and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ICTY experience in particular and international criminal justice more broadly.
Judging Justice assesses the ICTY’s efforts to deliver justice to victims by analyzing the opinions of witnesses who provided tribunal testimony. It extends and builds on the authors’ 2017 monograph, The Witness Experience: Testimony at the ICTY and Its Impact, and relies on the same underlying survey dataset of more than 300 ICTY witnesses, representing a broad cross section of the nearly 4,700 individuals who participated in its proceedings. The 2017 book introduced the core question that is taken up in the present volume: How do witnesses form their opinions about the ability of international courts to deliver justice? In addition, why do some witnesses see international courts as effective and others as ineffective? Given that providing justice to victims is the core mission of the ICTY and other international criminal courts, it is important both to understand whether victims believe international courts actually deliver it and to identify the sources of those beliefs. Justice is, after all, subjective. As Meernik and King write, only victims “can directly compare the injustices they suffered with the justice provided by the tribunal” (p. 22). Gaining some leverage on victim perceptions of international courts, therefore, can offer potentially important lessons for how courts might conduct themselves if they want to maximize their legitimacy in the eyes of those they are intended to serve. Can more equal distribution of prosecutions across ethnic groups provide greater satisfaction to victims? Do more guilty verdicts or longer sentences please victims? Can more deferential treatment of witnesses make a difference? Or are perceptions shaped by factors beyond the control of the institution, such as the nature of a group’s dominant historical narratives or the wartime experiences of the witnesses? This study helps answer those and other questions.
The book is organized into four substantive chapters bookended by an introduction and conclusion. The introduction lays out the core argument, provides an overview of existing research on individual attitudes toward international justice, and describes the survey data and methodology (though this is done in much greater detail in the 2017 volume). Chapter 2 unpacks the authors’ theory of witness opinions: in short, they surmise that witnesses’ views are shaped by three psychosocial factors: ethnic identity, a sense of fairness, and personal wartime experiences. Witnesses are likely to have more favorable views of a court, they argue, when judgments affirm a group’s historical narratives, when they believe the court has treated them and other witnesses fairly and that their participation has been valued and consequential, and when they have personally experienced significant wartime violence. The authors then devote a chapter to each of the theory’s three components, systematically examining the relationship between each of the variables and witness attitudes toward the ICTY. At the end of chapter 5, the authors pull together each of these variables into a comprehensive multivariate model to test their theory.
The book is commendable and compelling for its thorough and methodical analysis of the sources of witness attitudes toward the ICTY. For example, recognizing that “justice” is a fuzzy concept and that individuals may have very different conceptions of what it means, they parse it into four discrete elements: belief that the ICTY was effective in exposing key facts of the crimes committed, belief in the ability of the tribunal to assign responsibility for crimes, belief that the tribunal was effective in punishing perpetrators, and belief in the ability of the tribunal to deter future violence. This allows for a much more satisfying analysis.
Judging Justice affirms the conclusions of many previous studies on the ICTY that ethnic identity exerts a powerful influence on views of the tribunal. For those in the region, how one views the ICTY often depends on whether one is a Serb or a Bosniak, a Croat or a Kosovar Albanian. But Meernik’s and King’s survey data also show that ethnicity alone is insufficient to explain the variation in witness opinions. The real contribution of the study is its finding that views of the ICTY are colored not merely by ethnicity but also by perceptions of procedural fairness— particularly how participants feel other witnesses were treated—and the extent to which witnesses believed that their personal testimony had made a valuable contribution. They find that “fairness” is the most powerful predictor of perceptions of the ICTY’s efficacy: it is much more powerful than actual verdicts. We would expect, for example, that Bosniak witnesses might hold a more critical view of the tribunal when Serb or Croat defendants are acquitted or receive a relatively light sentence. But this is not the case. Witnesses might see the ICTY as generally ineffective at punishment, but strong at truth-telling and assigning responsibility for crimes. This finding adds important nuance to the dominant and popular view that identity alone can explain popular opinion toward the ICTY. At the same time, the data suggest (and Meernik and King acknowledge) that perceptions of procedural fairness cannot be easily disentangled from ethnic identity. Clearly, identity remains a stubbornly powerful lens through which individuals evaluate the efficacy of the tribunal.
Judging Justice advances our understanding of the impact of the ICTY on one important dimension: the provision of justice to victims. It does not attempt to assess its other core mandate: the establishment and maintenance of peace in the region. This is not a criticism of the book; these goals, although related, are analytically distinct and complex enough that they each deserve a full-length monograph. In fact, numerous studies have taken up the task of assessing the conflict management mission of the ICTY by examining its relationship to building the rule of law, democracy, and respect for human rights; healing psychological trauma; and fostering interethnic reconciliation in the region. But there is still much more investigation to be done. Despite the formal closing of the tribunal, the case remains fertile ground for engaging debates on the broader social and political impact of criminal prosecutions of atrocity crimes. The thoughtfulness, care, and methodological rigor with which Judging Justice has approached the question of the ICTY’s impact on victims make it a model for future research in this area.
