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Chapter Seven - The Anti-Impunity Transnational Legal Order for Human Rights

Formation, Institutionalization, Consequences, and the Case of Darfur

from Part III - Transnational Legal Ordering and International Crimes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2020

By
Joachim J. Savelsberg
Edited by
Gregory Shaffer  and
Ely Aaronson
Gregory Shaffer
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Ely Aaronson
Affiliation:
University of Haifa, Israel
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Summary

This chapter examines the formation of a new anti-impunity Transnational Legal Order (TLO), its institutionalization, and its consequences. Socio-legal scholarship and recent research on responses to the mass violence unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan, beginning in 2003, provide insights into strengths and limits of the new anti-impunity TLO. Based on a comparative eight-country study, involving in depth interviews in four social fields (human rights, diplomacy, humanitarian aid, media) and an analysis of 3,387 media reports, I review judicial steps taken on Darfur, conditions supporting them, and their consequences, interpreting them in terms of the transnational legal ordering approach. The case of Darfur shows the anti-impunity TLO at work, displaying it as a force that delegitimizes mass violence. Yet, it also shows impediments to institutionalization in the form of hostile state actors, fields with potentially competing agendas, including diplomacy and humanitarian aid, internal contradictions, and lack of enforcement power. Nation-level forces filter cultural effects of intervention, resulting in diminished concordance between the international and the global realms and across nation states.

Keywords

Anti-impunityjustice cascadeInternational Criminal Court (ICC)mass violencegenocideDarfurcultural consequences of anti-impunity lawsdiplomacyhumanitarian aidglobalization
Type
Chapter
Information
Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice , pp. 205 - 233
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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