Access to Justice for Forgotten Victims of International Crimes

Abstract

Despite having suffered inconceivable hardship, many victims of international crimes have no access to fair justice mechanisms to see their perpetrators held accountable - but are instead forgotten.

The seminar will first identify the gaps in the current enforcement system against international crimes that result in this situation, before discussing how victims and criminal justice NGOs can help to bridge these gaps through building extraterritorial criminal cases. After a brief history of the most emblematic cases (including the Pinochet and Habré cases), it will present Civitas Maxima’s case-building model - which combines systematic grassroots documentation of international crimes with flexible legal strategies to initiate extraterritorial cases in foreign domestic legal systems - and illustrate its effectiveness in seeking justice for forgotten victims of the two Liberian civil wars. Finally, we will consider the prospects of this kind of extraterritorial criminal cases in the years to come and whether there is hope for a more systemic change to the current enforcement reality.

Speaker biography

Felix Lüth is a Legal Counsel at Civitas Maxima, a non-governmental organization based in Geneva which focuses on the documentation of international crimes and the building of extraterritorial cases on behalf of forgotten victims. Prior to joining Civitas Maxima, he worked in the international law and white-collar crime practice groups of an international law firm in Geneva and as an assistant at the UN International Law Commission. He occasionally provides pro bono advice to the Legal Assistance Centre in Namibia on issues of international law, primarily relating to the application of international law in Namibia, and gender and minority rights.

In parallel to his work in practice, he is also a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and a Swiss National Science Foundation Visiting Fellow at the Transnational Law Institute of King’s College London. In his PhD research, he explores the transnational rise of settlement procedures as the increasingly main enforcement response to complex transnational financial crimes involving corporations. He is an academic member of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime and has recently been co-awarded the Davis Projects for Peace Grant for the project ‘Promoting Peace in Liberia through Criminal Justice Research and Cartoons’.