Toward Reparative Justice: Genocide Denial and (In)Access to Justice Under Domestic and International Law

This presentation focuses on victims seeking legal accountability for genocide under international and domestic law. It begins with the Holocaust, which influenced the recognition of the crime of genocide under international law in 1946 and its codification in 1948, and draws from subsequent genocides – such as the Cambodian, Rwandan, and the ongoing United Arab Emirates-backed Sudanese genocide and Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The presentation aims to explore the impacts of the Holocaust on the legal dimensions of genocide justice through the subsequent decades, and the limitations that still exist in responding to what the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda termed the “crime of crimes,” in The Prosecutor v. Jean Kambanda (1998). In exploring these limitations of access to justice, the presentation focuses on two categories of genocide victims. The first group are those that the Genocide Convention directly addresses - members of targeted national, ethnical, racial, or religious groups. The second group is one that is not directly addressed in the convention, and includes the anti-genocide activists and political dissidents who opposed each of these genocides and were subsequently persecuted for this dissent. In exploring both groups, their experiences, and their ability, or lack thereof, to seek justice for their victimization via domestic or international courts, this presentation ultimately asks a question of how much have courts historically protected both genocidaires and their accomplices (whether complicit third states or non-state institutions) and how much have they been able to offer justice for victims? Additionally, by taking lessons from decades of previous genocides prior to the major ongoing genocides we see in the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region today, the presentation seeks to move towards a clearer understanding of what is necessary for reparative justice following a genocide.