Celestine Greenwood reflects on World Day for International Justice
July 17, 2025
“30 years fighting for the truth and seeking justice.
The truth means finding the bones of our children and justice means ensuring the criminals pay for their crimes.
In the end truth always prevails.” Munira Subasic
Each year on 10th July, the day before the commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide, coffins are carried through the town and placed into the red earth of the cemetery, joining the thousands of the genocide already lying there. These are coffins containing newly discovered remains of the more than 8,000 victims of the genocide – the bones of children, sons, of husbands, of fathers, brothers and uncles; the remains of individuals killed thirty years ago in July 1995. Munira’s Subasic’s husband and son, and another 22 members of her extended family were murdered in the genocide at Srebrenica in July 1995. Her story is tragically an exemplar of those of the women of Srebenica left to endure the grief and fight for truth and justice.
Similar scenes can be witnessed every April in Rwanda – here too, bodily remains of some of the more than 800,000 people slaughtered in the frenzied 100-day genocide of the Tutsis are still being discovered. Each year these newly discovered body parts are ceremonially interned at the annual “Kiribuka” (Remembering) of the genocide some 31 years ago.
In virtually every year since the 1990s in which this solemn grieving and remembering has been taking place in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Rwanda similar atrocities – rape, murder, torture, privation, extreme cruelty and the “stealing” of children – have been inflicted on people around the world. Atrocities are being committed now, as you read this.
For many of us who are not directly affected by these atrocities it is perhaps an act of self-preservation to look away, to avoid “seeing.” Perhaps “seeing” would be far too much to bear, perhaps yet another reason to be outraged would be too much. But the survivors bear these atrocities, their wounds and pain, their lives decimated.
So, it is vital that today, 17th July, the World Day for International Justice – we are asked to “see,” to focus on, to renew our commitment to the protection of human rights, the upholding of the rule of law and the ongoing fight for justice for victims. If Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States was right when he said “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are” then we need, today at least, to be outraged by what has been done and what is being done to our fellow human beings.
Today was first declared and marked as the World Day for International Justice in 2010 at the Review Conference of the Rome Statute, in Kampala, Uganda. Today was chosen as it is the anniversary of the adoption, in 1998, of the Rome Statute and in turn, the establishment of the International Criminal Court located in The Hague which is now the site of international criminal justice.
Prior to the creation of the International Criminal Court various ad hoc international courts and tribunals were established to deliver justice to those who suffered atrocities in wars and conflicts. These include The Nuremberg Trials and the Tokyo War Crimes Trials in the aftermath of World War II, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (established in 1993), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1994), the Special Court for Sierra Leone (2002), the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (2007); a sobering list.
Since the International Criminal Court formally opened on 11th March 2003 thirty-three cases have been brought resulting in the issue of thirty-seven arrest warrants, 10 convictions and 4 acquittals. Currently outstanding warrants include warrants for the arrests of Omar al-Bashir, Vladimir Putin, his Children’s Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, Mohamed Deif, the military leader of Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Between them the cases and arrest warrants cover alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide variously in Sudan, The Philippines, Libya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Mali, Cote D’Ivoire, Kenya, Ukraine, Israel and Gaza.
This preponderance of cases relating to alleged crimes committed in various African countries fuels one of the main criticisms of the ICC, namely that it is biased and has disproportionately focused on alleged crimes committed in Africa. Other key criticisms include the slow pace of justice, the relatively small number of convictions and high costs, its limited jurisdiction and need for state cooperation, its inability to try individuals in absentia, and the limitations arising from the continued refusal of several major powers (the USA, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China) to ratify the Rome Statute and join the court.
Many of these criticisms have been variously levied against the earlier tribunals.
To return to Srebrenica, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, was not convicted for his part in the genocide (and other crimes) until 2016, some twenty-one years after the atrocity was committed. As one of the grieving widows and bereaved mothers, Bida Smajlovic, said to the Reuters news agency at the time of the conviction,
“This came too late. We were handed down a verdict in 1995. There is no sentence that could compensate or the horrors we went through or for the tears of only one mother, let alone thousands.”
Nothing can be said to gainsay the sentiment of Bida but perhaps we can take some comfort from Munira Subasic’s view that “in the end truth always prevails.”
As lawyers we are painfully aware that the law is sometimes but a blunt instrument and that for many experiences it simply cannot deliver “justice” as we understand and feel it in all its forms. That is not, however, a reason to give up the fight for justice, for ensuring that the international criminal legal system is empowered and supported to bring perpetrators to trial and punish them for their crimes.
As lawyers our duty today, of all days, is to advocate for international criminal justice, to fight against impunity and remind us all that no one should be above the law, to honour those who have suffered and suffer and honour the inherent dignity of every one of us.
In the end justice, as well as truth, must prevail. For that to happen, “justice” needs to be nurtured – the duty to do so rests with us.
