Richard Gaskins's "The Congo Trials in the International Criminal Court"

Richard Gaskins is Joseph M. Proskauer Professor of Law and Social Welfare at Brandeis University. He spent the past decade designing and directing student exchange programs in The Hague, which combined academic theory with hands-on practicums in courts and NGO's. He holds a Ph.D. (Philosophy) and J.D. from Yale University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Congo Trials in the International Criminal Court, and reported the following:

Wrenching violence struck a remote corner of the Congo in August 2002—far from the notice of international observers. Astonishingly, these events would eventually take center stage in the first full trials at the International Criminal Court (ICC), newly established in the Dutch city of The Hague. Page 99 describes the key moment in these Central African social dynamics, which would haunt the first two decades of the ICC’s existence. This is the pivotal turn for everything covered in the book.

The ICC had opened its doors one month before these fateful events in the eastern Congo. It was the culmination of the twentieth-century’s resolve to strike back against the human costs of war: a new permanent court to prosecute those responsible for “unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity.” All of that moral energy would be harnessed to slow-moving instruments of criminal-process. It had to start somewhere; and so the Court would look back, after almost twenty years, on its three landmark trials, featuring four Congolese suspects, and yielding a mixed record of two convictions and two acquittals.

Historic trials all have their roots in concrete events—which, in this institutional setting, became agonizingly difficult to reconstruct, years later, in a courtroom far from the scene of actual violence. Page 99 immerses the reader in those concrete events, in a chapter analyzing the structure of local struggles in Central Africa. Overall, the book describes wide cultural gaps separating these elusive details from the lofty legal categories used by the ICC, as the Court struggled to articulate new principles of global justice. Lessons drawn from the Congo trials indicate strong headwinds for this idealistic international court, still finding its way in a complex, culturally diverse world.

Learn more about The Congo Trials in the International Criminal Court at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue