Racial Difference

In July 2004, Louise Arbour was appointed the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, and she remains in this position as of this writing. She was also the prosecutor who in 1999 indicted Slobodan Milosevic for crimes against humanity. As such, she was the first prosecutor to indict a sitting head of state for war crimes. Arbour is a fiercely independent French Canadian jurist who became known as a “real-time” prosecutor with the intention of pursuing crimes while they were still being perpetrated by high-ranking war criminals rather than years later.

Despite her example, in 2007, four years after the escalation of violence in Darfur, prosecutorial attention still focused on investigations of lower-level government and military officials. This focus risked turning back the clock of international criminal law to the era of historical prosecutions of ex-Nazis years after Nuremberg or, worse yet, of no major prosecutions at all. Arbour wanted to arouse slumbering public opinion about the real-time “massive crimes” in Darfur. In her new role as High Commissioner, Arbour appointed Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for spearheading a campaign that resulted in an international land mines treaty, to chair a Mission on the Situation of Human Rights in Darfur. Yet, this mission confirmed little more than the well-known fact that “numerous efforts by the international community have not been successful in ending the conflict.”