ABSTRACT
Elsewhere in this book, we consider accountability mechanisms in international courts, whether ad hoc, such as those for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (Chapter 10); hybrid, such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Chapter 12); or permanent, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) (Chapter 13). In such situations, international law, both international human rights law and international humanitarian law, are applied by international or internationalized courts, not wholly domestic courts. However, there are also processes by which accountability is imposed transnationally. What is unusual about such processes is that they involve the application of international law in domestic courts, but not in the domestic courts of the country where the abuses or crimes actually took place. Instead, accountability may be found extraterritorially through the exercise of universal jurisdiction, imposing criminal accountability, or civil accountability processes in a number of states. In such situations, accountability is ultimately imposed quite far from the locus of the crime. The phenomenon of universal jurisdiction is widely known, thanks to cases brought against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte in Spain and elsewhere. You may be less familiar with another tool, that of civil accountability. It is particularly available in the United States through the use of the Alien Tort Claims Act. However, the United States and Europe are not the only locations where accountability might be exercised for past abuses: as discussed below, Argentina is seeking to exercise universal jurisdiction, and Senegal has come under some pressure to do so as well.
