The personal is always political. David Scheffer, the first US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, takes us on a personal journey that affects his nation, the world, and the quest to end impunity for the commission of atrocity crimes. This is a “book of crime scenes and victims, of the corridors of power and how policy-makers confronted megacrimes, how war criminals were pursued, and how courts to prosecute these war criminals were created against daunting odds”.

Scheffer's account draws on his personal experience covering eight years of work and some declassified US State Department cables. It relates as much to international relations as to law. If read as a manual, one can learn lessons on negotiation and gain exposure to the realities of how decision-makers conduct their business with respect to atrocity crimes. The persuasions and ideological bent of states are also sewn into the text, making for a colourful read.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I (Chapters 1 to 6) tackles the beginnings of an idea and depicts the efforts to build a series of war crimes tribunals. Chapter 1 opines that the atrocities in the Balkans in 1991 and 1992 prompted a reckoning for the perpetrators of war crimes in that region and brought back an “echo” from Nuremburg (p. 15). It discusses the birth of the Yugoslav Tribunal and the struggles in setting it up. Chapter 2 recounts the so-called failures of Washington to halt the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which, at its peak, cost the lives of 8,000 people each day. Scheffer believes that the conventional responses to an extraordinarily unconventional crisis led to lost opportunities in reversing the tide of killings at the earliest stages.

Chapter 3 describes the quest for credible justice for Rwanda and some of the birthing pains of the Rwanda Tribunal, including the contentious debate surrounding the Rwandan government's request for the Tribunal to impose the death penalty. Chapter 4 problematizes the mass killings in the Kosovo Serb enclaves despite the presence of the tribunals. What role did the Yugoslav Tribunal play in the Balkans conflict? Was there deterrence or did the Tribunal coexist with the relentless criminal assaults on civilians and prisoners of war? Chapter 5 asks similar questions about the Rwanda Tribunal, describing its early years as chaotic and full of uncertainty as to whether international justice would prevail for the victims of the genocide. Scheffer determines that the Tribunal rendered credible justice, and that never before has the rule of law been applied against so many leaders responsible for atrocity crimes in Africa.

Scheffer continues in Chapter 6 to tell of the “unbearable timidity” of the US and its European allies to rapidly plan and implement the arrest of fugitives from justice in the former Yugoslavia — including in particular Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, and Slobodon Milosevic.

Part II (Chapters 7 to 9) describes how the Clinton administration engaged in years of negotiation to create the International Criminal Court, how Scheffer rejected the final text of the Rome Statute, and why President Bill Clinton decided to sign up to the Statute at the end. Interestingly, Scheffer ponders over the US as an “exceptional nation”. By “exceptionalism” in international law, he means that the US has a tradition of leading other nations in global treaty-making endeavours, only to seek exceptions to new rules because of its constitutional heritage of defending individual rights, military responsibilities worldwide, superior economy, or “just stark nativist insularity” (p. 165).

Scheffer offers an account of some of the negotiations of the 1998 Rome Diplomatic Conference on the International Criminal Court. For instance, when days of intense negotiation had passed without significant progress, Hisashi Owada of Japan invited key negotiators from what Owada described was a divided house, and said that they could either satisfy themselves with progress made so far, or work out a compromise with a small package of common denominators attracting general agreement (p. 210).

Chapter 9 usefully clarifies what President Clinton's signing statement really meant: support for international accountability for crimes of atrocity; the importance of the complementarity principle in the Statute; and concerns about the Statute's significant flaws, with the hope that the Court's role would evolve for the better.

Part III (Chapters 10 to 12) concerns the tribunals responsible for addressing the atrocities in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia. Scheffer contemplates the role of the Yugolav Tribunal during the second episode of atrocities—the Kosovo conflict of 1998 and 1999—which became a major test for the Tribunal. He considers that, by 1999, the Tribunal and the US discovered that they had the courage to stand up to atrocity crimes, even though this was only after the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica.

Chapter 11 tells the story of the creation of the Special Court for Sierra Leone through Security Council Resolution 1315. The Special Court's rulings include many historic firsts, including the confirmation that domestic amnesties are no shield to international criminal prosecutions for atrocity crimes, and that heads of state are not immune from suit before international courts.

According to Scheffer, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia is a uniquely designed national court, with the mandate to bring senior leaders of the former Democratic Kampuchea under Pol Pot's rule to justice for their responsibility for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians and the suffering of millions. Scheffer presents his work as US war crimes ambassador as a personal mission.

This book offers a unique perspective on the history of the war crimes tribunals through the eyes of an insider to the process. Each tribunal has its own peculiarities and contextual backdrop from which justice is sought to be served. As a former war crimes ambassador, Scheffer relates actual events and describes decision-makers in action. Scheffer muses (p. 410) that the legacy of the tribunals has yet to be fully recorded, since its work remains ongoing. As Scheffer concludes, “[p]rinces and warlords may escape justice in the turbulent world of the twenty-first century. But the die has been cast” (p. 437).