A word from the Director
IJA-Forum adresses the wider public's as well as professionals' interest in unbiased analyses and presentations of publicly available data regarding situations and incidents related to the field of serious human rights violations (SHRV) and international criminal justice (ICJ). This also includes to present competing views and reports and to facilitate an open discussion with all of those who respect the ethical standards of an objective and non-partisan research.
Focussing on empirical factual analysis, IJA-Forum aims to bridge social science, in particular criminological as well as legal empirical research, with practical crime analysis in SHRV and ICJ.
But this Internet platform is also an offer for all experts involved in empirical analytical projects in humanitarian missions, ICJ but also, e.g. as defence attorney, looking for individual justice when mainstream authorities or non-governmental stakeholders are not available to follow their requests.
We aim to support all of those who try to make a difference in the quality of serious human rights violations and international crime analysis and the study of the respective law enforcement and judicial activities, and to use the most developed methods and technologies in international crime and justice analysis. This is not to say that we already have all the required 'tools', yet we hope to make this platform a global center where state of the art knowledge and methodology will be presented and provided in qualified training programmes. To meet this challenge we need support from crime analysts and academic researchers working in the field of ICJ from all around the world.
The underlying ethics for IJA-Forum is objectivity, truth and the honest desire for unbiased understanding of the analytical subjects. Yet, in this perspective we will try to shed a critical light on analytical methods where group think, ideological bias or just ignorance to methodological standards might be an issue. We invite all experts who are involved in analytical matters against the backdrop of international criminal justice and who share these values to join the IJAF membership and to participate in the endeavour of IJA-Forum with comments and advice to focus on the right and significant analytical issues. In turn we hope to provide substantial support in developing required skills but also analytical findings and knowledge for the better understanding of international crimes and their context.
We believe that all parties who search for truth and true understanding of past conflicts can agree in principle terms on the most advanced methodologies in international justice analysis – thus analytical findings produced on that basis provide a reliable 'meta-language' all parties and future generations can rely upon in truth-telling and their effort for enduring peace, and to fight states of denial or the ideological distortion in the reconstruction of past atrocities for egoistic and biased purposes.
Uwe Ewald
