ABSTRACT
Every manifestation of international criminal justice has occasioned a sizeable gap between the earnest expectations of their initial advocates and the disappointing reality of compromise, politics and unforeseen circumstance that ensues once they came into operation. The ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda were designed to ‘put an end to such crimes’ that occurred in each state and ‘contribute to the maintenance of peace’, but were helpless to prevent further war crimes in Kosovo and the Great Lakes region.1 Universal jurisdiction – heralded in a brief spurt of activity in the years before the ICC as a means by which municipal courts could successfully pursue international justice in the absence of international criminal tribunal jurisdiction – has been underutilised and criticised for jurisdictional imperialism, vulnerability to politicisation and difficulties of implementation.2 The advent of the ICC gave rise to a sense of optimism that ‘impunity has been dealt a decisive blow’, but this has receded in the face of slow trials, questionable decisions and the familiar obstacles of power politics.3 So too it has proven with the novel structure of the hybrid tribunal. Initially presumed to enjoy an inherent ability to knit the traditional preoccupations of international criminal justice to punish and deter with the more holistic aspirations of rule of law reconstruction, in practice the tribunals for Cambodia, East Timor, Kosovo and Sierra Leone have demonstrated that the imperative to punish quickly and cheaply has generally operated to the exclusion of the capacity-building and norm-inculcating functions their unique mixed structure appeared to promise.
