For our August edition of The Dispatch, The Reckoning Project’s monthly column, Legal Director, Wendy Betts, reflects on what it means to pursue justice at a moment when international accountability is increasingly under strain. Drawing on decades of work documenting atrocity crimes, Wendy examines why preserving evidence, protecting collective memory, and ensuring survivors’ experiences are heard remain essential, even when justice can feel distant.
By Wendy Betts
“Will this now bring justice?” A human rights defender from Syria asked me this question during a workshop on documenting atrocity crimes. Syria was five years into its brutal civil war at this point. The implied message was clear. These individuals had been documenting horrific events for years, yet these crimes continued unabated. Would a slight tweak to their documentation techniques really be the defining element. It’s a question I’ve heard in various forms over years of documentation work in conflict zones from Kosovo to Sierra Leone, from Palestine to Ukraine. Will the perpetrators really be held to account?
The skepticism, feelings of futility, and simple exhaustion are understandable. We look around and see conflicts raging for years and autocrats violently oppressing their people for decades. The victims and survivors often feel the world has forgotten about them. It is easy for the human rights defenders, who determinedly document shocking cruelty day after day, to have moments when they wonder what difference it will make.
We know the phrase, made famous by Martin Luther King, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this maxim better than the pursuit of accountability for atrocity crimes. These cases are not only practically and legally complex, but additionally, they require political will and international cooperation to apprehend the accused. Under the best of circumstances, holding perpetrators of these crimes to account is a long-term prospect. We are not currently working under the best of circumstances. I began my career in international criminal law during a time we thought was a new dawn in international justice. The architects of the atrocities in the Balkans, west Africa, Cambodia, and elsewhere were finding themselves in a courtroom facing the consequences of their actions. Today it feels as if that momentum is slipping away. The system of international criminal justice is under siege. The U.S. administration has vowed to dismantle it. Security Council members are waging wars in violation of the very United Nations Charter they are tasked to defend. Powerful actors seem immune from repercussions. Impunity feels almost inevitable.
However, what I said a decade ago in that workshop with the Syrian human rights defenders, is what I still believe now. While I cannot guarantee that documenting these crimes will put perpetrators in the dock, I can promise that if these crimes go unrecorded, there can never be justice. This simple truth is at the heart of TRP’s mission. Without evidence, there can never be trials. Without collective memory of what happened, history will be rewritten to suit the perpetrators. Without recognition of the harms, they are likely to be repeated. Without acknowledgement of the victims and survivors, we risk renewed cycles of violence and vengeance. Capturing and telling the accounts of what has happened is itself a form of justice.
TRP’s documentation and investigation contribute to each of these outcomes – compiling evidence, preserving the collective memory, exposing the harms, and most importantly acknowledging the experiences and courage of the victims and survivors. Recently, a Ukrainian woman, who shared her story with TRP, reached out to our legal team. She had been arbitrarily detained, tortured, and forced to work for her captors. She eventually escaped but was left with permanent physical and psychological harm. What she sought was to bring attention, not just to the crimes she suffered, but to the experiences of the many others like her. In her words, what was important to her was that the international community know what has happened.
The combination of TRP’s documentation, archiving, legal, media, and advocacy work amplifies the survivors’ voices to spotlight the harms that they have suffered and mobilize pressure and political will for accountability. I hold on to the belief that, though the timeframe may be long, through these efforts we are playing a part in bending the arc.