Editorial Comment
This series of blog posts is the result of an intensive mentoring process conducted within Module 4, dedicated to working with primary judicial sources of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Rather than approaching ICTY jurisprudence as a closed legal archive, the mentoring sessions and accompanying lectures invited participants to critically engage with judicial records as living materials—documents that continue to shape legal doctrine, political narratives, and collective memory in post-conflict societies.
Each contribution in this series reflects both individual research interests and a shared intellectual framework developed through the mentoring sessions. Together, the texts explore how international criminal law constructs facts, assigns responsibility, and produces legal truth—while also revealing the limits of judicial processes in addressing broader historical, moral, and societal expectations.
The blog post on the role of the ICTY in the institutionalization of international criminal justice situates the Tribunal within the longer trajectory of accountability mechanisms, highlighting its normative contribution to individual criminal responsibility and the erosion of official immunities. It provides the structural and doctrinal backdrop against which the other texts unfold.
This institutional perspective is complemented by the analysis of sexual violence in armed conflict, which examines the ICTY’s jurisprudential legacy in redefining sexual violence as a serious international crime grounded in bodily autonomy rather than notions of honor. The text further traces the uneven translation of these advances into domestic proceedings, exposing the persistent gap between international legal standards and national practice.
Questions of legal interpretation, morality, and responsibility come to the fore in the discussion of the Erdemović case. By examining the Tribunal’s divided approach to duress, this contribution probes whether international criminal law can—or should—demand moral heroism from individuals acting under extreme coercion, and what this debate reveals about the ethical foundations of criminal accountability.
The tension between judicial outcomes and lived experience is most explicitly addressed in the essay on “legal truth” versus “historical truth.” Focusing on the Gotovina case, this text demonstrates how a legally concluded case can remain historically and socially unresolved, illustrating the structural gap between criminal adjudication and the needs of memory, recognition, and reconciliation in post-conflict societies.
Taken together, these texts form a coherent whole: they reflect a shared engagement with ICTY materials shaped through mentoring discussions, peer exchange, and program lectures, while preserving the distinct voices and analytical approaches of each author. The series thus illustrates the value of guided, interdisciplinary work with judicial archives—not only as a method of legal analysis, but as a space for critical reflection on the role of international law in societies still grappling with the legacies of mass violence.
