Book Review: Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity by Carla Del Ponte and All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War CrimesTribunals by David Scheffer

Working in the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda and other special ad hoc courts and for the International Criminal Court created by the 1998 Rome Statute has been open to only a select few. However, through the memoirs of key court personnel and those building international criminal courts since the 1990s, we can develop a feel for the enormously difficult yet exceedingly important task of helping justice “roll down like waters” upon the heads of those guiltiest of crimes against the very nature of humanity. Two recently published memoirs are especially compelling in their ability to draw the reader into the legal triumphs, failures, obstacles, conundrums, disappointments, and elation of those working to ensure that international mechanisms bring perpetrators of mass crimes to justice. These books – Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity by Carla Del Ponte, Switzerland’s former Attorney General and the third prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals by David Scheffer, a law professor and the first American Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues – make very interesting companion volumes. With Del Ponte’s written by a court insider and Scheffer’s by a court outsider but insider to U.S. politics, the books offer quite different takes on bringing to justice accused war criminals, genocidaires, and perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Of the two books, Del Ponte’s provides an intellectually deeper, more objective and sophisticated exploration of these courts; Scheffer’s looks into labyrinthine governmental decision-making where political goals and orientations have both sharpened and warped the norms and procedures of universal justice.Both Scheffer’s and Del Ponte’s memoirs present in great detail unique experiences and views of two personages instrumental to the process of creating and operating international criminal tribunals in recent years. Their memoirs excel at defining the significant challenges to overcome in constructing an international court system able to take on the worst imaginable abusers of human rights, courts which to date have indicted, tried, and/or convicted hundreds of perpetrators of massive violations of human rights. The two books afford a strong sense of the extremely demanding task of striving to serve justice in a world where justice regrettably is still very often poorly served, as today’s situations in Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, Iraq, Central African Republic, Myanmar, and so many places unfortunately demonstrate. Contributing substantively to the literature on the growth of international criminal justice, Del Ponte’s and Scheffer’s memoirs will benefit legal scholars and human rights activists, law professors and students – and especially those interested in working to redress grave violations of human rights and to ensure that massive crimes against humanity are neither repeated nor committed with impunity.