The Promise and Practice of Reparations in International Criminal Justice

Reparations have emerged as a central concept in a more victim-oriented approach to justice and peace in the wake of mass atrocities. The International Criminal Court (ICC) became the first international criminal justice body to which individual victims could submit claims for reparations. Other internationalised criminal courts now also consider reparations for victims, most notably the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Yet, the role of reparations in international criminal justice remains contested among scholars, practitioners and activists, and considerable uncertainty surrounds how to translate the promise of reparations into practice. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in The Hague and Cambodia, my interdisciplinary paper examines the practice of reparations in the first cases before the ICC and the ECCC and tells a dynamic story of how these courts and local stakeholders have activated and interpreted the reparations mandates. Torn between legal and social imperatives, I discuss examples of how these courts draw on external knowledge and expertise to give effect to a mandate for which they are ill equipped. These insights help not only to understand how an internationalised idea can have different impacts in diverse local settings, they also raise questions about the initial promise for more victim-oriented justice. I conclude with some observations emerging from the experience thus far, which reveal the unsettled nature of reparations and some of the larger fault lines in post-conflict justice more generally.