Human Rights Quarterly

When we assess the record and effectiveness of an international court or tribunal, we often use quantifiable metrics such as the number of cases completed, suspects convicted, or witnesses heard. In his book Genocide Never Sleeps, Nigel Eltringham takes a different approach by shining a spotlight on what happens within these institutions, how the people who work there perceive their jobs and their international justice legacy. Enriched with long quotes from interviews and trial observation, Eltringham provides a deep and rich account that singularly adds a more personal dimension to existing studies on the legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). In his quest to get at law's power through the courtroom's mini dramas and to thus relay the "hidden script" that cannot be gleaned from merely reading trial transcripts, Eltringham describes the extratextual language of the court(room) by focusing for instance on body postures, gestures, and performance in Chapter 2 and the tribunal's setting and structure in Chapter 3.

Eltringham, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex, bases his book in social anthropology. His "deep hanging out in the Geneva of Africa" consisted of extensive fieldwork at the seat of the ICTR in Arusha, Tanzania, for eight months between 2005 and 2007, where he observed trials and conducted several dozen interviews with judges, lawyers, and other court officials. In addition, the book features insights from "informal conversations held during the day of coffee, tea and lunch breaks and in the evenings and weekends in bars, at dinner parties and on day trips."¹ This deep immersion can be felt in the book's pages when the author recounts snippets from judges' personal lives or lawyers' [End Page 428] exasperation with the trial process. For instance, the author reveals how the ICTR's simultaneous interpretation disrupted the lawyers' and judges' habitual behavior in the court room to use simpler language and get into what one interviewee called "tribunal mode."

The book's pages are filled with these experiences at the ICTR, extensively bookended or related to existing theoretical concepts on which the author draws, including theater metaphor/analogy, ritualization, or performance. For instance, he includes research on the problematic features of witness statements depending on which and how questions had been asked and how these statements were the facts based on which judges decided court cases: "Evaluation of statements given by Rwandan witnesses should, therefore, take account of the fact that statements can never be exhaustive and are products of questions asked."²

The strength of Genocide Never Sleeps lies in getting to know the people behind "international criminal justice" which reveals the diversity of experiences and legal perspectives that staff bring to the table. I applaud the author for being true to a multitude of understandings, diligently reporting the contrasting perspectives that he encountered. His account of the ICTR cautions us against homogenizing these institutions, the offices, and personnel within them. The author is especially assertive in his arguments when it comes to the impact of culture in the courtroom. Eltringham warns us of essentializing culture, in contrast to some judges and lawyers who would remark on the way that Rwandans testify and behave at the court: For the author, rather than Rwandan culture, "the four main impediments to witness testimony […] were the effect of interpretation; the fact that witnesses could only respond to the question asked by a lawyers or judge; the impact of protection orders that anonymized witnesses and that many witnesses had given multiple testimony in multiple for a."³ This shows the importance of different ways of "doing justice" and "raises the question of whether lawyers and judges misinterpreted as 'cultural' the witness's resistance to the exceptional way in which stories were elicited in the ICTR courtroom."⁴ Eltringham's book is essential reading for anyone interested in transitional justice and especially the ICTR. It shows what is often left...