Thierry Cruvellier

Thierry Cruvellier is an international journalist, war crimes expert, and author whose specialty is international criminal justice, especially the workings of international justice systems after war crimes and atrocities.

He was a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in Fall 2016, 2017, and 2019, and taught a capstone seminar for International Studies, International Studies 601: “International Criminal Justice: Models and Practice.” IS 601 focused on international courts, war crimes tribunals, conflicts and human rights tragedies in Cambodia, Chad, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and Sierra Leone. Distinguished Visiting Lecturers provide a practitioner’s perspective on current affairs by teaching special topics courses, hosting public events, engaging with faculty, and sharing in the intellectual life of the university.

Beyond the Tribunals: Thierry Cruvellier on Truth, Trials, and Teaching

During his time at UW-Madison, Bremen Keasey had the opportunity to interview Cruvellier about his experiences covering international and transitional justice as an international journalist. 

Thierry Cruvellier’s initial goal was to work as a freelance reporter in Moscow.

Instead, Cruvellier got lucky by earning “one of ten positions” in the world for students who just graduated from France’s journalism schools which would let him also avoid the at the time compulsory military service.

Cruvellier ended up “fulfilling his national duties” running a French language magazine in the English-speaking Sierra Leone, but he soon became a freelance reporter in Africa in the early 1990’s. In September 1994, Cruvellier — working with Reporters Without Borders — began to cover the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 in which an estimated 500,000-1 million Rwandans were killed.

When the UN established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Cruvellier said he and other reporters had to be there in part because they recognized the significance of the ICTR which — combined with the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia established in 1993 — felt like the start of a historical moment similar to the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

“Covering the tribunal was a bit of our ‘Nuremberg moment.’ We all studied Nuremberg at school, and all of a sudden, it was like the first international tribunal,” Cruvellier said. “It was such a defining event…there was no way we wouldn’t be there.”

From those early days of the trial, Cruvellier became fascinated by the reporting on the courts. If he got sick of covering just the legal aspect, he could cover many different angles: from a political science, international relations, philosophical or psychological lens.

“[The tribunals were] a very rich territory for a reporter or a writer,” Cruvellier said.

Since the ICTR, Cruvellier has traveled around the world, covering similar war tribunals in Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Colombia and Cambodia. He still works on covering issues in international justice, but he really enjoys coming to UW-Madison to teach a class for International Studies majors called “International Criminal Justice: Models and Practices.”

Cruvellier first visited Madison in 2006 when he participated in a workshop right after he published his first book about the Rwandan tribunal in French. UW-Madison was interested in publishing the book in English which began a good relationship between him and the University. Cruvellier came back to the University twice, once in 2010 and 2015 before he was asked to come and teach a course.

When Cruvellier began teaching the course in the fall of 2016, it worked well enough that he came back in the fall of 2017 and 2019 and he enjoyed the relationships he made with the people in the International Studies department and the mentality of UW-Madison and its students.

“It’s very pleasant. It’s smart, it’s a good university. [UW has] a very good level but at the same time it feels far more humble than some of the Ivy league universities may provide. I like that, I sort of felt really comfortable in that atmosphere,” Cruvellier said.

Cruvellier also said he enjoys the time he spends teaching because it’s a nice break from his day-to-day duties as a reporter. Cruvellier is the editor-in-chief of Justiceinfo.net, a website dedicated to reporting stories relating to international justice, and he enjoys the chance to come to UW and have fun with the students and faculty and discuss the issues instead of reporting them.

“I’m still a reporter, so the rest of the time [while not at UW-Madison], I’m deep into fieldwork. This is the moment during the year where I can take a step back and have conversations and debates with scholars’ whose job is to have time to think,” Cruvellier said.

Part of those discussions in class include reexamining the success of the initial International Criminal Tribunal models. Instead of solely focusing on the practices of his reporting, Cruvellier wants the class to be a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of those Tribunals and figuring out what they meant symbolically as well as what they did in practice.

25 years from the implementation of those new International Tribunals, there is now a reluctance to rely on that model because the results were a “mixed bag.” From monetary issues, political maneuvering and the need for governmental cooperation, the ad hoc tribunals often saw very little trials and convictions compared to the resources available. As the international justice movement has shifted away from this form of trials and attempts to tackle new battles like climate change, migrations, land grabbing, environmental crimes and corporate crimes, the framework and ideals created by the ICTR and ICTY still should be understood to advance the movement.

“I think it’s incredibly valuable to know what has been the experience of all these different models tried over the last 25 years,” Cruvellier said.

Cruvellier said that he hopes students in the class understand the human rights and international justice movement and how it relates to the huge field of international law. Both movements make many claims on what is capable, and assessing the claims and how they succeeded in previous trials can help future workers in those vast fields improve and become creative in their solutions instead of following the same playbook.

“Why repeat mistakes? We do that a lot. We do it a lot in foreign aid, foreign development and international justice,” Cruvellier said. “Hopefully this class can contribute to actually making progress in the field of international justice and transitional justice rather than repeating the same mistakes.”