Atrocity's Archives - Conceptualising Legal Archives in Transitional Justice

After the global proliferation of numerous transitional justice mechanisms such as international criminal ad hoc tribunals and truth and reconciliation commissions, many are nearing, or have come to, their completion. What will remain are their archival records that document not only the heinous crimes committed in the countries concerned, but also how transitional justice mechanisms operated. This paper proposes new ways of interrogating these mechanisms, particularly legal procedures, through archival narrative analysis. Firstly, the analysis of legal archival narratives can challenge presumptions about reconciliation, truth, healing and justice - notions that are believed to be the outcome of those legal procedures in transitional justice processes. William Booth (2001) points us to the fact that the judgment of the trial is final, but law and its memory is an unfinished business. Indeed, the very nature of archives challenges the notions of closure and finality dominant in the Transitional Justice discourse. Furthermore, the archive is simultaneously a representation of the commencement (the origin of the crime) and a representation of the commandment (the law) (Derrida 1998). Secondly, then, analysing the legal archive will not only enable an investigation of the ways crime is narrated in the courts, but also of the institutional identity of the courts themselves. This paper will draw on the archival documents of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to bring together theoretical work on archives and cultural memory studies, and literature on transitional justice as well as international criminal law. In doing so, the paper seeks to advance an interdisciplinary and a critical perspective on criminal procedures in transitional justice.