Prosecuting the Powerful: Justice at a Tipping Point

Author Steve Crawshaw discusses his book Prosecuting the Powerful: War Crimes and the Battle for Justice with Wolfgang Kaleck of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), moderated by Marija Ristic. Together, they will explore the promises and limits of international justice in holding leaders - from Putin and Assad to Netanyahu - to account for atrocity crimes. What progress has been achieved, what obstacles persist, and how can victims seek justice when politics interferes?

About the speakers:

Steve Crawshaw is the author of Prosecuting the Powerful: War Crimes and the Battle for Justice, published in German as Vor Gericht. Until 2023, he was policy and advocacy director at Freedom from Torture. Before that he worked for Human Rights Watch as UK director and UN advocacy director and Amnesty International as international advocacy director and Director of the Office of the Secretary General. He joined the Independent at launch, where his roles included Russia and East Europe Editor (covering the Eastern European revolutions) and chief foreign correspondent. His previous books are Goodbye to the USSR (1992), Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century (2004), Small Acts of Resistance (with John Jackson, foreword by Václav Havel, 2010) and Street Spirit: The Power of Protest and Mischief (foreword by Ai Weiwei, 2017). He was a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights in 2016-2017.

Wolfgang Kaleck co-founded the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and serves as its general secretary. He previously worked as a criminal law attorney at the Hummel.Kaleck.Rechtsanwälte law firm, which he co-founded in 1991. Since 1998, he has been involved in the Koalition gegen Straflosigkeit (Coalition against Impunity), which fights to hold Argentinian military officials accountable for the murder and disappearance of German citizens during the Argentine dictatorship. Between 2004 and 2008, he worked with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights to pursue criminal proceedings against members of the US military, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Marija Ristic is a manager in the Crisis Response Program at Amnesty International as an expert on open source and digital investigations and coordinator of the eight-university network Digital Verification Corps. Prior to that she was Executive Director of the Balkan Investigation Reporting Network, the leading media non-profit in Southeast and Central Europe. For her work as a journalist, she received numerous awards, including a European Press Prize and the Reporters Without Borders Annual Press Freedom award. She graduated from Geneva Academy for International Humanitarian Law, and has held fellowship positions at Columbia University New York and Free University Berlin. Marija is a guest faculty at Bard College Berlin, teaching a course on open-source research for human rights.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Julie Johnson Kidd Hall (W15)

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