Victims’ rights to take part in worldwide prison justice have lengthy been celebrated as empowering victims to have their say, share their experiences, have interaction in truth-seeking, and/or obtain emotional closure. For equally lengthy, nevertheless, many attorneys and NGOs have lamented that sufferer participation erodes the defendant’s rights to a good trial, creates punitive cultures and, in any case, is just too distant and juridical to be significant for victims of atrocity crimes in far-away nations. None of those views is unsuitable, however all of them overlook one thing extra apparent, banal even, particularly that victims take outing of their lives to take part within the ICC’s processes and in doing so additionally localize and legit the Courtroom’s interventions. Drawing on my new e book, Victims and the Labour of Justice on the Worldwide Legal Courtroom: The Blame Cascade (OUP, 2024), this publish explores what occurs if we conceptualize sufferer participation not as a authorized proper or a restorative justice measure however as a type of labour. Certainly, observing the ICC’s sufferer engagement in Kenya and Uganda, I used to be struck by how exhausting justice was; how a lot it regarded like arduous work, each for the Courtroom’s discipline employees and for victims.
However what does it imply to say that sufferer participation is labour? I argue that the Courtroom’s sufferer engagement calls for a type of labour, each from victims and people who ‘have interaction’ them, that we’re all aware of, what Marxist-Feminists name social replica work: all of the birthing, nursing, feeding, educating and caring that’s important for reproducing the employee and his labour energy, capitalism’s predominant supply of surplus worth, however is just not normally acknowledged or paid as work. We see the employee arriving on the manufacturing facility gate within the morning and leaving within the night, however we don’t see the unpaid home labour that occurs in between and across the clock. Certainly, as Marxist-Feminists argue, capitalism has intentionally obscured the important character of that labour by walling it off within the house and naturalizing it as a part of ladies’s position, invisibilizing and thus cheapening ladies’s labour.
Determine 1: Staff Leaving the Manufacturing facility in Barrow-in-Furness (England, 1901) © BFi Participant
I argue that one thing comparable is going on in worldwide prison justice the place sufferer participation and victims’ labour are important for reproducing the Courtroom as a legit and dealing establishment however are usually not acknowledged as work, neither by the Courtroom nor by the encompassing literature.
Determine 2: Making home labour seen – a poster by © Crimson Feminist silk-screen collective within the Seventies-Eighties
A part of the rationale for this oversight is that each supporters and critics of sufferer participation are likely to give attention to the victims’ position within the courtroom or their instrumentalization as ‘passive, harmless’ sufferer tropes. After all, if we take a look at the courtroom, the victims’ position does look quite restricted. We are able to see the victims’ attorneys however no victims, besides once they act as witnesses. Within the Ongwen case, the primary case in Uganda, solely seven out of the 4095 collaborating victims really ‘had their day in courtroom’ in The Hague. However this overlooks what the ICC does exterior the courtroom, ‘within the discipline’, for instance in Kenya and Uganda the place I carried out ethnographic observations and interviews with the Courtroom’s discipline employees, victims’ attorneys, civil society, intermediaries, and victims between 2014 and 2019. (General, I carried out 134 interviews together with with practitioners in The Hague.)
Certainly, the fixation on the courtroom gives a quite skewed picture of what ‘doing’ worldwide prison justice entails as mirrored within the following numbers which the Courtroom used to characterize its accomplishments for the yr 2023:
- 2 new arrest warrants
- 126 hearings
- 4 ongoing trials
- 46 witnesses testified
- 16,000 victims participated within the proceedings
- 1600 victims acquired reparations
- 17,000 victims in 8 conditions benefitted from help
- 400+ outreach conferences with affected communities
- Over 34 million individuals reached in 16 nations
The primary 4 figures relate to courtroom proceedings and are quite modest, however then the numbers begin to climb: 16,000 victims participated within the proceedings; 17,000 victims benefitted from help programmes; over 34 million individuals had been reached in 16 nations by way of media and neighborhood outreach. Because the ICC itself put it in its ‘Justice at Work’ sequence: ‘what you see within the Courtroom is the tip of the iceberg. For simply sooner or later of Courtroom hearings, a whole bunch of individuals are working behind the scenes to make it occur’.
That is much more pertinent for sufferer participation which actually occurs within the Courtroom’s state of affairs nations the place outreach officers, victims’ attorneys and their discipline assistants usually meet victims and affected communities to replace them on the trial, hearken to their tales and reply their questions. Thus, similar to in home economies we ‘see’ the manufacturing facility however not the family labour which makes manufacturing facility labour doable within the first place, in worldwide prison justice we (as Western viewers) are likely to ‘see’ the courtroom however not the sector actions that underpin it.
Determine 3: What we ‘see’ once we consider sufferer participation: The ICC’s courtroom in The Hague © ICC flickr
Determine 4: The place sufferer participation really occurs: Screening of the Ongwen trial in Lukodi, Uganda © ICC flickr
Sufferer Participation as Labour
What occurs within the discipline? What do victims really do once they take part in worldwide prison justice? To search out out, I talked to victims’ employees, intermediaries and victims in Kenya and Uganda. Whereas few immediately characterised sufferer participation as ‘labour’, they usually talked about it as if it was work. Victims complained that they’re exhausted from attending conferences and demanded that they need to be paid for ‘their contribution’ to the Courtroom’s work (greater than the ‘transport reimbursement’ a few of them obtain). Victims’ employees and attorneys lamented that victims normally come late to the Courtroom’s conferences and are usually not sufficiently centered on, engaged with, and knowledgeable concerning the trial. Take into account how one discipline assistant in Uganda described the challenges of sufferer participation on the bottom:
They [the victims] nonetheless don’t perceive totally the way it works and even what is anticipated of them. Originally, we had shoppers who had been telling us that they’re uninterested in attending conferences, however one would count on that that is one thing that somebody who has chosen to take part would perceive, that is the expectation: that is their responsibility. So, that is one thing we needed to undergo time and again and inform them, step-by-step: ‘Do you keep in mind if you got here in to use? That is what participation means. That is what is anticipated of you, to share your views. The trial can not go on with out you giving us your views. It turns into pointless if we’re to work with out you…. (Interview with Discipline Assistant, Kampala, 9 July 2019).
Right here, we encounter the quite disciplinary high quality of participation: you might have agreed to take part, now you should share your views. As victims are roped into the Courtroom’s processes, sufferer participation morphs from a authorized proper or democratic measure – making victims’ voices heard – to a labour kind – making victims work for the Courtroom, principally without spending a dime. And sufferer participation isn’t precisely a short-lived dedication. The ICC’s trials drag on for years and even many years. For instance, the trial towards Dominic Ongwen, a speedy trial by ICC requirements, started in 2016 and continues to be within the reparation section. Sufferer participation can be dangerous labour. Victims should journey, generally for hours, on unsafe roads, crossing checkpoints, bribing cops, to satisfy the Courtroom’s attorneys and outreach officers. And in nations by which the federal government is hostile to the ICC’s intervention, like within the Kenyan instances, sufferer participation can turn out to be very harmful labour, certainly. Removed from ‘having their day in courtroom’, victims invisibly labour within the courtroom’s shadow for years.
Why don’t we see or acknowledge victims’ labour? A part of the reason being that victims in rural areas within the International South, particularly in Africa, the place the Courtroom tends to function, are sometimes handbook, subsistence and reproductive staff whose time is just not valued. One other half is that participation is just not seen as work as a result of victims do it to obtain justice. It’s their dedication to justice, quite than any authorized obligation or monetary incentive, which makes them undertake that labour. Justice, like a lot social replica work, might thus be thought of a labour of affection. As Silvia Federici explains, a ‘labour of affection’ is a type of labour which isn’t outlined by a wage contract and whose very character as labour is hid by ideological and affective expectations that we do it as a result of we wish to do it, as a result of we imagine in it, as a result of it’s a part of who we’re, or as a result of we love these we do it for. And love, in fact, is meant to be given freely.
Victims’ Labour: A Labour of Love?
Whether or not or not the labour of justice could be thought of a ‘labour of affection’, it’s undisputable that the Courtroom’s sufferer engagement exacts loads of emotional labour each from victims and people who work with them, whether or not victims’ attorneys, discipline employees, native assistants or intermediaries. Take into account, for instance, how one victims’ officer in Uganda described her work of facilitating victims’ purposes to take part within the Courtroom’s proceedings:
They [the judges] gave us six months to file purposes after the affirmation of prices. …One factor that struck me is that many victims, and I met with all the 4100 victims, for all or most of them, it was the primary time that they ever sat down with somebody to hearken to them, to take down their story, from their perspective … Doing this was, personally, and I come from Northern Uganda, so it was an attention-grabbing factor, nevertheless it was additionally unhappy, as a result of I didn’t see how we had been in a position to shut the injuries that we had been opening by way of the applying course of… It was emotionally draining. Actually, I bought sick after the applying course of, like, it was manic; it was very quick; it was emotional. For me, there was simply an excessive amount of that I needed to take care of (Interview with Discipline Officer, Kampala, 9 July 2019).
Who finally ends up doing most of that labour? Victims’ work is gendered and racialized as gendered and racialized staff do most of that labour. African attorneys could be employed cheaply as discipline assistants or interpreters, and intermediaries, usually victims themselves, do many of the work of participating victims and affected communities as unpaid ‘volunteers’ or ‘associates’ of the Courtroom. The darker you’re, the nearer you’re to victims, the extra emotional labour you do, the much less useful your work is.
Determine 5: From the ICC’s Web site: ‘Civil Society and the ICC’ Hague © ICC Web site
How victims’ labour is devalued by way of feminization could be illustrated with the instance of native intermediaries who assist the Courtroom with proof assortment, outreach and sufferer engagement on the bottom. Many intermediaries are skilled staff, however few are acknowledged as such by the ICC. Certainly, the Courtroom insists that ‘the perform of an middleman … is in precept unpaid’. Intermediaries are reimbursed for eligible bills quite than paid for his or her labour. That is very true for sufferer engagement, versus investigations, the place the Prosecutor’s workplace would extra usually use paid, contracted intermediaries (see right here para 203). In my interviews, the Courtroom’s victims’ practitioners usually emphasised that it’s intermediaries’ cultural and private proximity to victims and witnesses quite than their skilled experience, which makes them useful to the Courtroom, not legislation however love. By associating intermediaries with emotions and values like belief and care, their labour is hidden whereas ethical expectations are heightened, which then stirs emotions of betrayal and outrage when intermediaries are usually not ‘trustworthy’, once they betray the Courtroom’s belief, once they make the most of their position, once they begin gatekeeping. Certainly, it’s usually simpler responsible those that fail in love, not legislation. Suppose, for instance, of society’s relentless blaming of ‘the uncaring mom’, that unpaid important employee, who, as Jacqueline Rose argues, turns into the last word scapegoat ‘for all the things that’s unsuitable with the world’.
Wages for Victims?
However deciphering sufferer participation as labour additionally raises the query of what it contributes to worldwide prison justice. Not a lot, some imagine. One of many judges I interviewed in The Hague in 2013 insisted that the courtroom’s ‘core enterprise’ is investigating and prosecuting atrocity crimes which may very well be executed extra successfully with out sufferer participation (see additionally right here and right here). However that ignores how victims’ labour makes the Courtroom a legit establishment, particularly at a time when the justice ideology has shifted (and you will get a way of that if you happen to observe the Courtroom on X) from seeing justice as one thing that’s finest judged from a distance to embracing it as a course of that must be engaged, localized and participatory not solely to be significant but additionally to be marketable to states, donors and the ‘worldwide neighborhood’. It additionally overlooks the significance of unpaid or underpaid labour for the Courtroom’s ‘core enterprise’. Perennially constrained by a good price range, the ICC couldn’t presumably examine and prosecute successfully in 17 nations throughout 4 continents with out low cost or free native labour, a lot of which is supplied by victims, witnesses, NGOs and victims’ associations. In my e book, I additional present that what’s at stake within the Courtroom’s sufferer engagement is just not merely the replica of the Courtroom by way of the labour of victims but additionally the replica of world capitalist relations by recruiting and coaching these on the world periphery, who’ve been ‘unproductive’ because of years of warfare and displacement, as capitalist topics who willingly settle for their place on the backside of the worldwide division of labour.
However right here I wish to briefly contemplate the political and normative implications of contemplating sufferer participation as labour. Ought to victims be paid for his or her labour? Do we have to monetize their contribution to worldwide prison justice to worth it? In a world by which each capitalist worth and normative worth are measured within the cash kind, which additionally provides the technique of survival, paying victims, intermediaries and sufferer staff pretty for his or her labour seems like the appropriate method. However what if that makes worldwide prison justice unaffordable? Or even when it was inexpensive, what if it turns justice into one thing that folks solely pursue for cash? The ‘Wages for Housekeeping’ marketing campaign within the Seventies confronted comparable questions. They replied as follows: ‘we don’t say that gaining a wage is the revolution. We are saying, nevertheless, that it’s a revolutionary technique, for it undermines the position we’re assigned within the capitalist division of labor … our purpose is to be priceless, to cost ourselves out of the market, for housekeeping and manufacturing facility work and workplace work to turn out to be “uneconomic”’. On this manner, calls for for ‘wages for victims’ which are simply dismissed as ‘unrealistic’ or ‘counterproductive’ can turn out to be prefigurative for a brand new world of labour producing a brand new world of justice. Certainly, if justice staff, together with victims, had an actual say in the kind of justice they’re producing (quite than merely a ‘voice’ in a top-down authorized course of), the latter will presumably tackle new meanings and varieties, together with extra redistributive, community-based, deliberative and reparative justice processes.
