The Journalist Perspective: Low Expectations and Promising Trends in Transitional Justice

Bio

Thierry Cruvellier, journalist and author, is the editor of JusticeInfo.net and an Op-ed contributor to The New York Times. For more than twenty years, he has been covering war crimes trials before international tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Cambodia, as well as national justice efforts in Colombia and the Balkans. More recently he has covered the trial of Hissène Habré before the Extraordinary African Chambers, in Senegal.

Cruvellier covered the war in Sierra Leone between 1990 and 1996 and was Reporters Without Borders representative in the Great Lakes region (Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Uganda) in 1994-1995. He has been a consultant for a number of non-governmental organizations, including the International Crisis Group, the International Center for Transitional Justice and Internews. He has led training programs for journalists on transitional justice in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Haiti, Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Turkey and Central African Republic. Since 2016, he is a Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2003-4 and holds a Masters in Journalism from Sorbonne University, Paris. He is the author of three books: Court of Remorse-Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Wisconsin University Press, 2010), The Master of Confessions-The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2014), and Terre promise (Promised Land), a book on Sierra Leone not yet published in English.