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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.

Cet article presente le jugement historique de l'ancien dictateur du Tchad, Hissene Habre, par les Chambres africaines extraordinaires au sein des tribunaux senegalais, et la longue campagne pour la justice qui l'a precede. L'article etablit que le role central des victimes a cree une dynamique politique irresistible qui a force la tenue du proces, permettant de mettre en lumiere la lutte des victimes et de rendre justice pour un large eventail de crimes.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which met from January 28 to March 8, 1991, in the shadow of the gulf war, nevertheless completed what many observers considered its most productive session in recent history. The Commission took action on a record of nineteen country situations—creating new rapporteurs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait—began plans for a 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and set up an intersessional working group to complete a draft declaration on disappearances. The most important long-term accomplishment of the Commission, however, was the creation of a five-member working group to investigate cases of arbitrary detention throughout the world.

The coercive methods approved by senior U.S. officials and widely employed over the last three years include tactics that the United States has repeatedly condemned as barbarity and torture when practiced by others. Even the U.S. Army field manual condemns some of these methods as torture. Although much relevant evidence remains secret, a series of revelations over the past twelve months, brought together here, already makes a compelling case for a thorough, genuinely independent investigation of what top officials did, what they knew, and how they responded when they became aware of the widespread nature of the abuses.