Gerhard
Anders (University of Zurich)
Managing Doubt on the Frontline of
International Humanitarian Law: Outreach Events of the Special Court for
Sierra
Leone
International criminal tribunals increasingly recognise the need to communicate with the people in whose name justice is said to be done in order to legitimise their time consuming and cost-intensive operations. The work of the outreach section of the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Sierra Leone and Liberia is said to be exemplary in this regard.
The court employs locally
recruited ‘outreach officers’ in the districts of the Sierra Leone hinterland
to conduct so-called outreach events to inform the population about the court’s
mandate, the trials being heard there and the basic principles of international
humanitarian law. Generally, they meet highly critical audiences who challenge
the official narrative. Confronted with these criticisms the outreach officers
tend to emphasise their professional detachment. In private, however, they
often expressed doubts about their mission and their ability to live up to
their difficult task. As a consequence, they oscillated between engagement and
detachment, between arrogance and anxiety, in their day-to-day activities. The
ethnographic evidence gathered during the court’s outreach events highlights
the contradictions of international humanitarian law outside the protected
sphere of court rooms, scholarly debates and humanitarian campaigns in the
West.
