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This chapter examines the organizational structures that the prosecutors have established for their offices at the international criminal tribunals and courts. It also analyses the management of international prosecution offices. These offices have faced knotty management challenges — some of which are common to all the tribunals — including setting up, establishing a productive office structure, recruiting and retaining highly skilled staff, securing evidence and the cooperation of witnesses, managing vast quantities of data, and effectively communicating with stakeholders. Sections 2 to 12 of the chapter describe and analyse in turn the structures, organization, and management of the eleven different international prosecution offices from that set up in Nuremberg in 1945 until the time of this writing. Section 13 concludes that the organizational structures of these offices have been varied and adapting over time, and that the results were driven, more than by any other factor, by the qualities and skills of the individuals involved rather than the structure or hierarchy in place.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to speak to some of the controversies that surround modern atrocity trials. It then considers the history of international prosecution and the specificity of international criminal tribunals. A brief overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter conceptualizes and analyses the understudied question of accountability and ethics of international prosecutors. Ethics refer to the set of standards and principles that characterize ‘right conduct’ in the exercise of a profession. Accountability can be seen as both a process (and the procedures that go with it), or an end-state, a quality (that of being accountable). The core of accountability is that one can be called upon to answer for one's behaviour and decisions. How one is made to answer in the context of international prosecutions is the object of the chapter.

This chapter talks about crime and prosecution in terms of warfare, specifically the pressures that these create and their changing context. It starts with a description of the various ways that the war laws changed during the twentieth century, before shifting to the development and the history of various war crimes prosecutions. The late 1990s presents the growth of international criminal law, with a focus on international prosecution, which is reviewed in the next section. The chapter also studies the Global War on Terror and its issues, concluding with the argument surrounding the current evolution of the strategic environment.

This chapter focuses on Human Rights Watch’s strategy, challenges, the role played by civil society, and the strokes of fate that accompanied the twenty-year effort to convict Hissène Habré. The Habré trial was the fruit of what has been called ‘one of the world's most patient and tenacious campaigns for justice’. This campaign was waged over two decades by Habré's victims and their supporters, who improbably succeeded in creating the political conditions to bring a former African president to justice in Africa, with the support of the African Union. The victims' coalition ‘essentially served the case to the EAC on a silver platter’, determining the contours of the prosecution and dictating the nature of the trial itself, thereby contributing to its emancipatory impact. Ultimately, the Habré case shows how a ‘private international prosecution’ can allow victims to achieve criminal justice on their own terms.

This chapter examines how the response to transnational threats has led to a reassessment of how intelligence can be shared through international organisations, with particular reference to the relevance of the United Nations debate over whether countries such as the United States should share intelligence with and through the UN before turning to a discussion of five areas in which it has been used within the UN system: peacekeeping, weapons inspections, targeted financial sanctions, the use of force, and international criminal prosecution. It then analyses the use of national intelligence in an international forum and its implications for the ability of intelligence agencies to maintain appropriate secrecy. The chapter concludes by outlining the limits of cooperation with regards to intelligence and the UN's lack of an intelligence capacity of its own.