During the 1980s, thousands of Chadian citizens were detained, tortured, and raped by then-President Hissène Habré's security forces. Decades later, Habré was finally prosecuted for his role in these atrocities not in his own country or in The Hague, but across the African continent, at the Extraordinary African Chambers in Senegal. By some accounts, Habré's trial and conviction by a specially built court in Dakar is the most significant achievement of global criminal justice in the past decade. Simply creating a court and commencing a trial against a deposed head of state was an extraordinary success. With its 2016 judgment, affirmed on appeal in 2017, the hybrid tribunal in Senegal exceeded expectations, working to deadlines and within its budget, with no murdered witnesses or self-dealing officials.

This book details and contextualizes the Habré trial. It presents the trial and its impact using a novel structure of first-person accounts from 26 direct actors (Part I), accompanied by academic analysis from leading experts on international criminal justice (Part II). Combined, these views present both local and international perspectives through distinct but inter-locking parts: empirical source material from understudied actors both within and outside the court is then contextualized with expert analysis that reflects on the construction and work of: the Extraordinary African Chamber (EAC) as well as wider themes of international criminal law. Together with an introduction laying out the work and significance of the EAC and its trial of Hissène Habré, the book is a comprehensive consideration of a history-making trial.

About the Author:
Dr. Sharon Weill is Assistant Professor at The American University of Paris and a Senior Lecturer in international law and associate researcher at Sciences-Po, Paris (PSIA/CERI). Her particular field of interest is the relationship between international and domestic law, the politics of international law and the role of courts- topics on which she has published several articles and book chapters. Her post-doctoral research on the Guantanamo Bay military commissions was conducted at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley (2015-2016). Prior to that, she participated in the European research project "Security in Transition" led by Professor Mary Kaldor (London School of Economic), and was a research fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian and Human rights law for several years. She received her PhD in international law from the University of Geneva in 2012.

Kim Thuy Seelinger, JD, is Research Associate Professor at the Brown School and Visiting Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis, where she is also the inaugural director of the cross-disciplinary Center for Human Rights, Gender, and Migration under the Institute of Public Health. From 2010-2019, Seelinger served as the founding Director of the Sexual Violence Program at the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she remains a Research Fellow. In 2015, she co-authored an amicus curiae brief on sexual violence under customary international law in the Habré case. Seelinger received her JD from New York University School of Law and is a member of the New York bar.

Dr Kerstin Bree Carlson is Associate Professor in the Law Department of the University of Southern Denmark, where she teaches in the Masters of International Security and Law program. She is also affiliated with The American University of Paris and iCourts at the University of Copenhagen. Carlson began her work on the Habré trial in 2015 as a post-doctoral researcher at iCourts at the University of Copenhagen, and did extensive field research in Dakar. Carlson received her JD and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.