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Criminal Justice Is Local: Why States Disregard Universal Jurisdiction For Human Rights Abuses, Jeremy A. Rabkin, Craig S. Lerner
Criminal Justice Is Local: Why States Disregard Universal Jurisdiction For Human Rights Abuses, Jeremy A. Rabkin, Craig S. Lerner
Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law
A German court recently convicted a minor Syrian official of abuses committed in Syria's civil war. The case was announced with fanfare but has since stirred no interest. Nor should this be surprising. The world has been here before. There was intense excitement in 1998, when British authorities arrested Augusto Pinochet, the former president of Chile, for human rights abuses committed in Chile. It was taken at the time as vindicating the doctrine that the worst human rights abuses fall under "universal jurisdiction," allowing any state to prosecute, even for crimes against foreign nationals on foreign territory. As generally acknowledged …