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The Criminal Chambers for International Crimes in The Hague District and Appeals Courts in the Netherlands form the principal judicial units of examining magistrates, trial judges, and specialized staff tasked with investigating and adjudicating individual criminal cases under the principle of universal jurisdiction. The Hague Courts are mandated to deal with crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, crime of aggression, torture, enforced disappearances (International Crimes), as well as piracy and international terrorism. Launched as part of the 2003 International Crimes Act (Wet Internationale Misdrijven), the Chambers have tried a dozen individuals from Africa, Asia, and Europe.

What happens to people who are accused of atrocity crimes at the bar of public opinion, are publicly indicted, prosecuted, tried, acquitted of criminal charges and then released? Does the mud stick? Or can the dirt also turn into gold, after legal exoneration and possible compensation? This article seeks to trigger a conversation on the international justice community’s stance on condemnation, compensation and convalescence. Through several versatile histories and stories, it gauges how exonerated persons have been navigating life after acquittal. To what extent have they managed to reverse, or recover from, their previous scandalizations, and if so: how? In thinking about this question, we problematize international justice community protagonists and prosecution services’ modus operandi (and effects) of scandalizing first and prosecuting alleged atrocitaires later. We observe that under the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s current circumstances (operating like a cage in search of birds) more suspects have been scandalized than convicted, but that often the scandal lingers. We conclude that for most acquitted persons requesting post-trial compensation is a dead end, and that doing so for some might further increase reputational damage. While several acquitted people ultimately remained defamed, some exonerated persons fully recovered from the human rights scandal by redefining compensation, and by turning the table and scandalizing the ICC.

How is memory weaponised in the Russian-Ukrainian war? In this episode, Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt talk with historian Nanci Adler. How does she, as a scholar of transitional justice, reflect on this conflict? What is the significance of Vladimir Putin’s shut down of the Russian human rights organisation Memorial? And how does this feed in to Russia’s repression of its Stalinist history?

How and why did the rules of war come about? To what extent and how can the 1949 Geneva Conventions be operationalised in both past and contemporary war? In this episode Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt talk with historian Boyd van Dijk about his brand-new book Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions (Oxford University Press, 2022). Van Dijk takes us through rationales for the Conventions, by placing them in world historical context and highlighting the role played by some remarkable people. Also, he discusses how the Geneva Conventions could provide a prism through which to perceive the Dutch colonial war in Indonesia between 1945 and 1949, and today’s Russia-Ukraine conflict.

On Tuesday 22 February, the District Court of The Hague closed its latest universal jurisdiction trial, against an Afghan-Dutch national alleged to have been head of the Pul-e-Charki prison in Kabul in the 1980s. But the trial has been rife with challenges around this war crimes probe.

Mardi 22 février, le tribunal de district de La Haye a clos son dernier procès relevant de la compétence universelle, contre un binational afghan-néerlandais soupçonné d'avoir été un commandant et un chef du département des affaires politiques de la sinistre prison de Pul-e-Charki, à Kaboul, dans les années 1980. Le procès a mis en exergue ce qui semble être de vastes défis autour de l'enquête sur des accusations de crimes de guerre.

La semaine dernière, la Cour d'appel de La Haye a achevé ses audiences sur d’anciens crimes en Éthiopie. Alors que se poursuit le conflit au Tigré, la "Terreur rouge" du Derg, il y a quarante ans, peut sembler être une histoire du passé. Pourtant, ce procès tardif a réveillé de douloureux fantômes chez les victimes comme chez l'accusé, Eshetu Alemu. L'historien Thijs Bouwknegt raconte l'histoire d'un homme qui espère encore un acquittement alors qu'il est sur le point de mourir.

Oorlogsmisdaden Hoewel de wereld roept om gerechtigheid voor de burgerslachtoffers in Oekraïne is de kans klein dat Poetin, of andere verantwoordelijken, terecht zullen staan, schrijft Thijs Bouwknegt.

International criminal jurisprudence, principally that of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), notes that “under customary law, ‘purely personal motives’ do not acquire any relevance for establishing whether or not a crime against humanity has been perpetrated.” Similarly, at the International Criminal Court (ICC), “the [Rome] Statute does not envisage any requirement of motive or purpose to prove that a policy to commit an attack against the civilian population exists.”Against this background, we ask …

Hoewel de wereld roept om gerechtigheid voor de burgerslachtoffers in Oekraïne is de kans klein dat Poetin, of andere verantwoordelijken, terecht zullen staan, schrijft Thijs Bouwknegt., Oorlogsmisdaden Hoewel de wereld roept om gerechtigheid voor de burgerslachtoffers in Oekraïne is de kans klein dat Poetin, of andere verantwoordelijken, terecht zullen staan, schrijft Thijs Bouwknegt.

What did it mean to live in Europe under German occupation? In this episode Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt talk with professor Tatjana Tönsmeyer on the new Source Edition 'Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage. Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe'. How did these two volumes come about, and what sources does it cover? And in what way did food shortages affect the lives of ordinary people as well as specific groups such as Jews, Sinti and Roma, and women — and how did they cope with it?

In deze speciale editie van Niod Rewind zitten Anne van Mourik en Thijs Bouwknegt aan de directeurstafel van het Niod. Ze spreken met Martijn Eickhoff en Frank van Vree. Martijn volgde op 1 september 2021 Frank op als directeur. Wat dreef hen om de Tweede Wereldoorlog, de Holocaust en wereldwijd massaal geweld te gaan onderzoeken? Hoe reflecteert Frank op zijn voorbije directeurschap? En hoe ziet Martijn de toekomst van het instituut voor zich?

This article treks through the timeworn remnants of Czechoslovakia’s Communist forced and correctional labour uranium camps in the Ore Mountains in the northwest Bohemian region of Jáchymov. These camps held tens of thousands of detainees, largely political prisoners convicted in sham trials or individuals sent there for re-education. Conditions were deplorable. Throughout the 1950s, the young Czechoslovak Communist regime compelled detainees to hard, life threatening labour and subjected them to maltreatment and arbitrary violence. This article traces some of the visible, invisible or overgrown artefacts of the former camps, as well as public as private memories about what happened there. It reflects on the current memoryscape of these forgotten places of human suffering and describes the aesthetics of these aging sites of atrocity.

Young men at a roadblock check crossers’ scruffy papers. ‘Your ID’, yells a youngster. ‘I am not a Tutsi’, ripostes a woman with a baby on her back. ‘Have you seen your nose?’, demands a boy. Seconds later, a gang batters the lady to the ground, with machetes and sticks, because ‘she is a Tutsi warrior’. The next scene in Netflix’s ‘The World’s Most Wanted’ displays an avenue littered with corpses. Episode two of the series, about Rwandan businessman Félicien Kabuga, explains the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in the naivest terms: ‘It began when members of the Hutu tribe began slaughtering members of the minority Tutsi tribe’. Arrested in May 2020, Kabuga may be the last alleged génocidaire to be tried before a United Nations tribunal. But his criminal trial on charges of controlling a radio station that promoted Hutu Power ideology, and creating and supporting Interahamwe death squads will not clarify how and why Rwandans participated in mass killing. Fortunately, Omar McDoom’s ‘Path to genocide’ comprehensively shows how and why the conditions for popular violence arose.

Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt interview historian Kylie Thomas and journalist Michael Schmidt, discussing forced disappearances under Apartheid South Africa. Michael is the author of Death Flight: Apartheid's secret doctrine of disappearance, which investigates and tells the history of Apartheid’s chilling tactic of throwing people, dead or alive, from airplanes so that their remains cannot be found. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission on human rights violations during the Apartheid years was established in 1995. Kylie Thomas researches and writes about the 2017 reopening of the Apartheid cases. Who exactly were the people who were targeted for ‘disappearance’? And how come cases of activists who were imprisoned, tortured and murdered, are only now being reinvestigated and reopened?

International tribunals come and go. By the 2020s, it became clear that the international community had less appetite for international justice than in the early 1990s. Against the background of the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC), the United Nations’ (UN) International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) — one of the only ever two fully powered UN tribunals — was a unique past phenomenon. Its unfinished business lives on in the UN’s International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT). Following the arrest, in mid-2020, of the ICTR’s main fugitive, Félicien Kabuga, its Arusha branch will convene the last major international trial. While awaiting the proceedings, and to get a taste of what the ICTR was about, one ought to read Nigel Eltringham’s latest book, with the eye-catching and distressing title Genocide Never Sleeps. It stems from a lawyer who joked, at 1 O’clock in the night over drinks at the ICTR’s popular hangout Via Via, ‘genocide never sleeps and neither should we’.1 It alludes to both what has become a trope for the mass murder of Rwandan Tutsi – proverbially carried out when ‘God was sleeping in Rwanda’ — and to sleepless nights working on complex and haunting cases. No matter how provocative, unsettling and confusing, this utterance illustrates how some lawyers were ‘living the law’.

What are the problems of genocide and how to rethink mass death? In this episode Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt interview historian Dirk Moses, whose book The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression just came out. How does the legal concept of genocide distort our thinking about civilian destruction? What does genocide, as the ‘crime of crimes’ still mean for other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities and drone strikes?

Dans le procès d'Al Hassan, ancien membre de la police islamique au Mali, les preuves devant la Cour pénale internationale sont largement cachées au public. Même les témoins experts occidentaux bénéficient désormais de l'anonymat et de séances à huis clos. Le chercheur Thijs Bouwknegt met en garde contre cette nouvelle détérioration du caractère public des procès pénaux internationaux. À qui d'autre que les communautés victimes la justice internationale s'adresse-t-elle en priorité ? demande-t-il.

In the trial of Al Hassan, a former member of the Islamic police in Mali, evidence before the International Criminal Court has been vastly hidden from the public. Even Western expert witnesses are now granted anonymity and closed sessions. Scholar Thijs Bouwknegt warns of the consequences of this new step in the deterioration of the publicity of international criminal trials. Who else than affected communities is international justice primarily for? he asks.

In episode 8 of NIOD REWIND, Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt interview historian Iva Vukušić. Iva is a lecturer at Utrecht University and a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. She recently defended her PhD — online (!) — which focuses on Serbian paramilitaries and irregular armed forces during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Iva worked for the Sense News Agency in The Hague, analyzing evidence from trials at the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and before that, she was an analyst and researcher at the Special War Crimes Department of the State Prosecutor’s office in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Follow her on Twitter: @VukusicIva

The second trial of a Malian jihadist is underway at the International Criminal Court. Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud faces charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for what happened in Timbuktu during 2012 to 2013 when Islamic fundamentalists took it over. Already the court has looked at the destruction of cultural heritage – the city was an ancient centre of Islamic scholarship with extraordinary mosques, shrines of ancient Islamic saints and libraries. But our two guests told us how much more there is to the al Hassan trial. Women’s rights expert Georgiana Epuré, who joined in her personal capacity, explained about the gender aspects of the charges and how the court will have to rule for the first time on gender-related crimes. Thijs Bouwknegt, long term trial monitor and historian at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust & Genocide Studies unpeeled the prosecution and defence strategies so far.

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In deze speciale reeks van de NIOD podcast gaan onderzoekers van het NIOD in op de coronacrisis en de onzekere tijden die dit met zich mee brengt. Hoe ervaren zij de crisis zelf? En hoe analyseren zij, vanuit het perspectief van hun onderzoek, de gebeurtenissen in de samenleving? In de eerste aflevering spreekt Anne van Mourik met Ismee Tames.

Last week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) heard the closing arguments in the trial of Ugandan Dominic Ongwen, five years after his first appearance. In no other ICC trial have case narratives been so opposite, morally complex and riddled with paradoxes, say historian Thijs Bouwknegt and criminologist Barbora Holá, who describe how the Ongwen saga seems “both the ICC’s success story and antithesis of what it stands for and fights against”.

In December 2019, the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies organised a conference in collaboration with IMIS University of Osnabrück: ‘Negotiating Displacement: New Perspectives and Connections in War, Migration and Refugee Studies’. The conference aimed at connecting research on war, mass violence and genocide with migration studies in order to deepen the dialogue between two disciplines that often look at similar phenomena but from different viewpoints. The conference’s guiding question was how displacement has been negotiated with regard to trajectories and status by individuals and groups from the First World War to the present in a global perspective. Scholars, journalists and migrants discussed displaced person’s agency, room for maneuver and possibilities for creating their own social and cultural spaces within the limited and often harsh social, economic and political parameters. How can we understand the dynamics surrounding these processes? In this podcast: Anne Irfan, Avi Sharma, Christoph Rass, Eugene Michail, Ismee Tames.