Forensic evidence in atrocity trials: A risky sampling strategy?

Abstract

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Moving Beyond Formal Truth Practices and Forensic Truth in the Syrian Conflict: How Informal Truth Practices Contribute to Thicker Understandings of Truth

“…Separating law radically from morals and politics is a choice, she argued, and not an epistemic inevitability (Benhahib and Linden-Retek, 2021). This tendency towards legalism in transitional justice has manifested itself in a ‘prosecutorial preference’, i.e., the prioritization of criminal justice (Obel Hansen, 2017), the dominance of legal scholars and practitioners in the field (Fletcher and Weinstein, 2017), and the prevalence of large institutionalized mechanisms underpinned by the familiar legal or forensic approaches of bringing to light factual, corroborated evidence, and of obtaining accurate information through reliable (impartial, objective) procedures (Fournet, 2020). This legalism thus affected the mainstream understanding of truth in transitional justice, meaning that even if truth is arguably the element undergirding all other transitional justice processes, the narrow understanding of forensic truth became prevalent in these legal approaches (Rowen, 2017).…”