Anti-Impunity and the Turn to Criminal Law in Human Rights

Abstract

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the human rights movement has been almost synonymous with the fight against impunity. Today, to support human rights means to favor criminal accountability for those individuals who have violated international human rights or humanitarian law. It also means to be against amnesty laws that might preclude such accountability.

This article both chronicles and critiques this turn to criminal law within human rights. It argues that as criminal law has become the enforcement tool of choice, it has negatively affected the lens through which the human rights movement and the international law scholars who support it view human rights violations. In short, as advocates increasingly turn to international criminal law to respond to issues ranging from economic injustice to genocide, they reinforce an individualized and decontextualized understanding of the harms they aim to address, even while relying on the state and on forms of criminalization of which they have long been critical.

Keywords: International human rights, international criminal law, transitional justice, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, amnesty, human rights movement, right to truth