Politics and Prosecutions, from Katherine Fite to Fatou Bensouda appears in Proceedings of the Fifth International Humanitarian Law Dialogs, Elizabeth Andersen and David M. Crane, eds., 2012, Forthcoming. Here's the abstract:“Certainly mankind has been befouled with a stain that won’t be removed in a week or a month.” So wrote Nuremberg lawyer Katherine Fite while preparing for the post-World War II trial of nearly two dozen Nazi leaders. In that single sentence Fite not only remarked that memory of atrocity may shred human ties for generations, but also admitted that prosecution alone cannot bind war-torn societies. Essential, her letters made clear, is politics – robust political support for social recovery as well as criminal accountability.
Katherine Fite with Robert Jackson via IntLawGrrls
Based on the Katherine B. Fite Lecture delivered at the 5th Annual International Humanitarian Law Dialogs in Chautauqua, New York, this essay examines the role that politics has played in the evolution of international criminal justice. It first establishes the frame of the lecture series and its relation to IntLawGrrls blog, a cosponsor of the IHL Dialogs. It then discusses the career of the series' namesake, Katherine B. Fite, a State Department lawyer who helped draft the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and who was, in her own words, a "political observer" of the proceedings. The essay then turns to the the International Criminal Court, in which the first Prosecutor insisted that his was a "judicial" mandate wholly separate from politics. With an eye to transition this year, when a new Prosecutor will assume office, it considers how the ICC might work more effectively within the context of policy choices its officers make.
More of Amann's Women at Nuremberg project can be found in these two papers and these posts from IntLawGrrls.
