Bringing together legal experts from around the world, Promoting Accountability under International Law for Gross Human Rights Violations in Africa is a 600-page, 27-chapter study on the work and contribution of the first international judicial mechanism dedicated exclusively to challenging impunity for serious international crimes committed in Africa. That mechanism was the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), established in 1994 to address crimes committed during the Rwandan genocide. The court closed its doors in 2014 after 20 years of prosecuting those most responsible for the gravest crimes.
Coedited by former ICTR lawyers Charles Chernor Jalloh and Alhagi B.M. Marong, the book serves as a dedication to the work of the international jurist Justice Hassan Bubacar Jallow, the Tribunal's longest serving Chief Prosecutor and the first prosecutor for the United Nations Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals. In late June, he was appointed by the UN Secretary-General, along with retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Marie Deschamps, to investigate allegations of sexual abuse in the Central African Republic.
The chapter by Faculty of Law Professor Joanna Harrington examines the development of best practices in human rights monitoring when serious criminal cases are transferred between courts, and between jurisdictions. The need to wind up the work of the ICTR has led to the transfer of cases from the international judicial arena to competent national courts in Rwanda and France, with the ICTR and its Prosecutor having developed new mechanisms for the monitoring of such cases. It is Harrington's argument at the close of her chapter that these monitoring practices may have application to the cross-jurisdictional and cross-border surrender of persons wanted for trial more generally.