History and the court: the role of history at the ICTY
History and the court: the role of history at the ICTY

Summary/Abstract: Should history have a place in trials before international war crimes tribunals? “No,” wrote Hannah Arendt in her classic work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). For her, the courts had no business making historical judgments. But at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, history and historians have routinely been a part of trials. Donia, who has testified in fifteen trials at The Hague as an historical expert witness, assesses the successes and failures of incorporating history into the trials, using judicial decisions for writing history, and using the documentation assembled by the Tribunal to advance historical understanding of the region’s history in the last decade of the twentieth century.

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