Is amnesty an appropriate response to past human rights atrocities? Scholars andpractitioners promoting transitional justice around the world have argued, ingeneral, that it is not. They contend that legal, moral, and political dutiescompel governments emerging from authoritarian rule to hold perpetrators ofhuman rights violence accountable. Beginning with the post-World War IINuremberg and Tokyo Trials and continuing with the creation of the ICC, theinternational human rights system has attempted to replace the traditionalpractice of amnesty with a new norm of accountability for human rightsviolations. International conventions – adopted in the second half of thetwentieth century – now obligate state parties to provide redress forvictims of torture and genocide. The UN international criminal tribunals for theformer Yugoslavia and Rwanda, set up in the early 1990s, underscore theinternational duty to hold perpetrators accountable. The notion of universaljurisdiction, and its use in the effort to extradite former Chilean dictatorGeneral Augusto Pinochet from the United Kingdom to stand trial in Spain in thelate 1990s, claims that courts in one country can hold foreign perpetratorsaccountable for crimes against humanity committed in another country.

An accountability norm has spread throughout the world, producing dramatic andunprecedented results. Although General Pinochet did not stand trial in Spain,he did face charges in his own country before he died. Other heads of stateresponsible for human rights abuses have also faced trials, convictions, andprison sentences in Latin America, including former Peruvian and Uruguayanpresidents Alberto Fujimori and Juan María Bordaberry. In December 2011,former military dictator Manuel Noriega was extradited from France to his nativePanama to serve his prison sentence for human rights violations for which he hadalready been convicted in absentia. No region of the world hasbeen exempt from accountability efforts. In Europe, one landmark case is the UNInternational Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia efforts to convictformer President Slobodan Milošević for grave human rightsviolations, including genocide, torture, and extermination committed in Bosniaand Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo; Milošević died in 2006 whilethe trial was still ongoing. In Africa, former Liberian President Charles Taylorfaces prosecution before the Special Court for Sierra Leone for eleven counts ofwar crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations ofinternational humanitarian law perpetrated in Sierra Leone.