Strategies for Internationalizing Justice

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the transnational mobilizations of Latin American and Central Eastern European justice activists to render justice for gross human rights violations perpetrated by the military and communist dictatorships during the Cold War. It demonstrates how Latin American actors deployed a variety of anti-impunity tactics, targeted numerous foreign jurisdictions, and legitimized their cause through a liberal humanitarian discourse on human rights. Through both their efforts in various Western European courts and the alliances they forged with Western lawyers and judicial officials, Latin American activists boosted universal jurisdiction as a principle of international criminal law. This principle was further enforced by Argentinian courts, which opened investigations into a variety of major international crimes committed across the globe. In contrast, Central Eastern European activists focused their mobilizations on the European level, lobbying for the establishment of a ‘Nuremberg for communist crimes’—an international legal instrument that would have put communist crimes on par with those of the Nazis. Their political discourses were often connected to radical conservative politics and aimed to delegitimize any leftist political thought. While managing to enforce a totalitarian interpretation of communism in European assemblies and to reshape the EU’s remembrance policy, Central Eastern European activists’ impact on the international justice system ultimately remained marginal.