Professor Kathryn Sikkink, Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and FAU honorary doctor, delivered a public evening lecture in English entitled "Is the Justice Cascade Over? Accountability in an Era of Impunity" in cooperation with the Research Center for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU CHREN) at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). The lecture took place at the premises of FAU CHREN.
After an introduction by Professor Dr Katrin Kinzelbach, Chair of Human Rights Politics at FAU, Professor Sikkink gave the lecture, followed by a discussion with Academy Director Professor Dr Christoph Safferling.
The emergence of individual criminal accountability for war crimes, mass atrocities and the violation of human rights is among the most dramatic normative developments in international politics over the past half-century. Nevertheless, we document a sharp global decline in prosecutions for these crimes since 2010 and developed a theory on the demand for and supply of justice to explain this trend. She showed that the global shift was driven by a reduction of prosecutions in domestic courts and that the interaction of a state’s level of liberal democracy and its legacy of past human rights abuse is strongly predictive of domestic trial initiation. While past legacies of repression and violence were addressed in openings created by democratic transitions, contemporary democratic backsliding risks denying today’s victims justice in the future. (CHREN/em)