Melbourne Law School - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemThe figure of the victim in international criminal justice( 2015)In international criminal justice (ICJ), victims appear centre stage. Victims are invoked in the arguments for setting up international(ised) criminal courts and they appear in a range of institutional practices of these courts. Yet, while they appear centre stage, there is nothing self-evident about their particular appearances. This thesis turns to one particular international(ised) criminal court for a close reading of the ways in which victims figure in ICJ. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the ECCC or the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, was set up through an agreement between the United Nations and the Cambodian government to bring to trial senior leaders and those most responsible for crimes committed during the period when Cambodia was known as Democratic Kampuchea. Amongst the currently operating international(ised) criminal courts and tribunals, the ECCC is a productive context in which to examine victim figurations. This is not because it is ‘typical’ institution, but because it goes further than its predecessors and contemporaries. In the thesis, I trace the victim moving through the ECCC, a movement that holds both repetition and difference. Rather than asking how a certain ICJ instrument is or is not working for subjects that hold ontological priority, I ask: how do practices of international criminal justice represent victims when representation is understood as a practice of subject formation? How do the practices of a court make a subject called ‘victim’ intelligible? Against a backdrop of a few iconic and ordinary trials in ICJ, I attend to the ECCC practices of victim figuration as the workings of both representation and performativity. In each chapter, something new is brought, a new moment in the proceeding, a new iteration of the victim. It advances from the pre-trial, to the trial and then beyond the trial in outreach. In each chapter, I ask the same question about how the victim figures, I make the same assumption as to the significance of language. Studying crimes against humanity, victim participation, and photographic images, I argue that the figurations of the victim – both individual and collective – are manifold and indeterminate. Ultimately, what these figurations bring to bear is a performance of the international legal order as a politics of transition.