What Can be Done if Perpetrators are Dead or Protected by Impunity Laws?

Abstract This article builds on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law (CAICL) scholarship to contribute to the decolonial turn in international criminal justice. To do so, this empirically grounded article examines the decolonial critique of international criminal justice and uses the case of Argentina to show how victims’ organizations have developed original initiatives (‘escraches’, truth trials, people’s tribunals) to address international crimes, which can complement traditional forms of international criminal justice. These victim-driven initiatives can not only work as justice-seeking mechanisms when perpetrators are dead or protected by impunity laws but also as decolonial tools in three ways: (i) to address critical shortcomings of Northern-dominated international criminal law, including victim participation, costs, selectivity and formalistic operation, and its primarily punitive features; (ii) to address colonial crimes even though the perpetrators are dead; and (iii) to open up the international criminal law debate to the voices and experiences of victims, what we will call the ‘demographic South’, from Argentina, a country in the global South.