Justice on Screen - A Study of Four Documentary Films on the International Criminal Court

INTERNATIONAL LEGAL THEORY: Symposium on the Changing Role of Scholarship in International Law

*. Professor of Public International Law, Centre for the Politics of Transnational Law, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam [

[email protected]

]. I would like to thank Tanja Aalberts, Lianne Boer, Mark Drumbl, Oliver Kessler, Elies van Sliedregt, Sofia Stolk, Christine Schwobel and Sergey Vasiliev for their useful comments on earlier versions of this article.

1.

Introduction

The year 2014 witnessed the release of Watchers of the Sky, one of the latest documentary films on international criminal justice.¹Based on Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell, the film tells the story of Raphael Lemkin's lifelong struggle for an effective legal response to genocide. The film features not only Power herself, but also some key figures in international criminal law such as Ben Ferencz, Chief Prosecutor for the Einsatzgruppen case and life-long advocate for international criminal law, and former ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. The film won several nominations and awards at film festivals and has been positively received and promoted by a range of human rights organizations and film critics. Watchers of the Sky is by no means unique in its focus on international criminal law, its promotion through film festivals, the appearance of key figures in international criminal law, or its links to human rights organizations. In the past ten years, many more documentaries on international criminal law were produced, screened at film festivals, promoted by critics and embraced by advocacy groups.²

The recent proliferation of documentaries on international criminal law seems to confirm that we 'live in a visual age, in which life takes place on a screen'.³However, there is more to it than that. A similar proliferation of documentaries took place some 70 years ago, when post-Second World War trials were the subject of several documentary films, often sponsored or solicited by governmental authorities.⁴Subsequent high profile cases such as Eichmann or Barbie have also been the topic of documentary films.⁵Apparently, the prosecution of international crimes lends itself well to representation in documentary film. This is not surprising given that there are at least two structural similarities between international crime trials and documentary films.

In the first place, international criminal trials are often...