This chapter summarizes the maximum sentences available to domestic courts around the world for the perpetration of acts of terrorism. In more than one-quarter of all States this includes the death penalty. The chapter then describes the prosecution of terrorism suspects in selected domestic courts across the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe. It considers the reasonableness of the charges laid, the fairness of the trials, and the legitimacy of the sentences imposed upon conviction. Some of those prosecuted for terrorism offences are children or women. The overwhelming majority, though, are men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five years.

Chapter 7 argues that law’s framing of accountability results in an inevitably partial and fractured picture of wrongdoing for historical abuse. The chapter argues that despite a focus on accountability for historical child sexual abuse, non-sexual historical abuses, especially those authorised or ignored by law, struggle to achieve modern-day legal accountability against individuals, institutions, or states. Law’s claim to sovereign authority is unable to comprehensively address historical-structural abuses, which may challenge the legitimacy of the legal order created by states and churches. The chapter considers these challenges in the context of accountability mechanisms, including criminal prosecutions, civil litigation, and the use of canon law.

National and international lawyers are ubiquitous in transitional political negotiations. However, their role in advancing or stalling negotiations, or in advocating or resisting progressive change, is generally carried out behind closed doors. This chapter explores when and how lawyers living and working within repressive, conflicted, and transitional states influence the content of transitional political agreements. It draws on twenty-five interviews with lawyers who participated directly in negotiations and other informed commentators in our case study sites. Combining this empirical data with literature on lawyers as negotiators, the sociology of the legal profession, and critical international legal theory, the chapter explores the factors that shape relationships between lawyers and the political leadership in negotiations. The chapter further critically analyses the extent to which lawyers’ negotiating styles and legal skills can advance or inhibit the reaching of an agreement. The final section explores the discretion and capacity of lawyer-negotiators for legal imagination in crafting transitional futures. We find that lawyer-negotiations often have to grapple with reconciling their role as legal technicians with the ethical and political challenges of advising on law’s content at times when the law itself is indeterminate or subject to negotiation.

The place of accountability for human rights violations in peace processes is hotly contested. Accountability measures are routinely conceived as both an essential component of peace and as an obstacle to its achievement. This chapter examines the role of accountability in the pursuit of peace in legal, theoretical, and empirical terms. It argues that in the absence of empirical consensus on the contribution made by accountability measures to the pursuit of peace, assessments of their role are largely normative and depend on precisely how peace and accountability are themselves conceived. That is, it argues that although broadly conceived accountability is an essential component of positive, consolidated peace, its imposition in the form of prosecutions and punishment during peace negotiations may be detrimental to the achievement of minimal, negative peace, marked by the cessation of hostilities.

The second chapter examines how public portrayals of local courtrooms continued to change in tandem with the widening reach of summary justice in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this period, magistrates’ courtrooms became among the most common and public sites of personal, concrete contact between ordinary citizens and the state in its various guises. As the advertisements that crowded the pages of the new popular press broadcast the expanding availability of products and services, columns of “Police Intelligence” broadcast the expanding roles of courtrooms and the authority of magistrates, police, and municipal agents. In doing so, they served to delineate that authority in the public eye and to either condone or condemn – largely the former – its expression and to assess the morality of individual responses to it. By portraying these daily encounters between the state and the people, police-court columns offered readers a common standard for defining morality, for determining victims and villains, and for measuring justice and injustice in the courtroom.

Chapter 9 synthesises the main findings of the study and gestures towards the implications of the research on a broader level as well as questions raised. It draws insights for advances in theories on human rights promotion in post-conflict societies, making the case for principled pragmatism: an approach predicated on contextual interpretation and application of standards whilst remaining true to human rights principles, and on the use of constructive and collaborative strategies and techniques in policy development and advocacy. The chapter presents lessons that can be learned from Rwanda: how children’s involvement in violent crimes can dramatically influence the perception of childhood, a factor which should be taken into account when seeking to promote child rights at the community level; whether the prosecution of children was preferable to non-prosecution; whether UNICEF was right to become involved with the issue of child perpetrators in Rwanda; and what approaches to child perpetrators UNICEF should be promoting, briefly exploring alternative modalities of accountability, including truth-seeking and indigenous justice and reconciliation mechanisms. Whilst affirming the role of UNICEF, it concludes by emphasising that ultimately it is the state that decides on accountability and that is responsible for implementation of, and compliance with, international standards.