Available June 2010Available June 2010“In Twilight of Impunity, Judith Armatta has done for the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the Butcher of the Balkans, what Hannah Arendt did for the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Architect of the Holocaust: present an unflinching depiction of the crimes, the anguish of the victims and witnesses, the arrogance of the killers, the virtues and flaws of the judicial process, and the banality of the evil that can arise when leaders assume they enjoy impunity.”—Chuck Sudetic, author of Blood and Vengeance and co-author of Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity
An eyewitness account of the first major international war-crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg trials, Twilight of Impunity is a gripping guide to the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The historic trial of the “Butcher of the Balkans” began in 2002 and ended abruptly with Milosevic’s death in 2006. Judith Armatta, a lawyer who spent three years in the former Yugoslavia during Milosevic’s reign, had a front-row seat at the trial. In Twilight of Impunity she brings the dramatic proceedings to life, explains complex legal issues, and assesses the trial’s implications for victims of the conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s and international justice more broadly. Armatta acknowledges the trial’s flaws, particularly Milosevic’s grandstanding and attacks on the institutional legitimacy of the International Criminal Tribunal. Yet she argues that the trial provided an indispensable legal and historical narrative of events in the former Yugoslavia and a valuable forum for victims to tell their stories and seek justice. It addressed crucial legal issues, such as commanders’ responsibility for crimes committed by subordinates, and it helped to create a framework for conceptualizing and organizing other large-scale international criminal tribunals. The prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague was an important step toward ending impunity for leaders who perpetrate egregious crimes against humanity.
Judith Armatta is a lawyer, journalist, and human-rights
advocate who monitored the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on behalf of the
Coalition for International Justice. Her dispatches from The Hague appeared in
Tribunal Update, published by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting;
Monitor, a magazine of political commentary published in Montenegro; the
International Herald Tribune; and the Chicago Tribune. Prior to her work in The
Hague, Armatta worked for the American Bar Association’s Central and East
European Law Initiative, opening offices in Belgrade, Serbia (in 1997) and
Montenegro (in 1999). During 
the Kosova War, she headed a War Crimes
Documentation Project among Kosovar Albanian refugees in Macedonia. Armatta
currently consults on international humanitarian, human rights, and other
rule-of-law issues, most recently
in the Middle East. She lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
June 2010. 560 pages, 15 illustrations
978-0-8223-4746-0, hardcover $39.95
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