Justice as the Art of Muddling through: The Importance of Nyaya in the Aftermath of International Crimes

The Importance of Nyaya in the Aftermath of International Crimes Antony Pemberton Rianne Letschert In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt wrote that the problem of extreme evil would be the defining problem of post-war intellectual life. Central to this is the understanding that where the power that is normally established to protect citizens is instead employed to harm them or even to kill a substantial number of them, these crimes become a matter of international concern. This is a key element of the notion of international crimes. The international quality of the justice reaction to this is then a function of the fact that the jurisdiction in question has proven to fail the minimum standard that one could expect of a law-governed polity: that the authority in question should not condone — let alone actively participate in — the commission of international crimes. In the terms of...