Since the 1990s, international criminal law has struggled to find the proper role for victims in mass atrocities trials. It has gradually moved from viewing victims instrumentally in supplying eyewitness testimonies for the prosecution towards recognizing the victims’ agency and seeing them as active participants in such trials. In this lecture, Israeli law professor Leora Bilsky considers the complex relationship of testimony and film at the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials. Her analysis centers on how eyewitnesses understood the new role of the camera in the courtroom. What is ultimately at stake in this investigation is a new conception of testimony. 

Bilsky is a professor at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. She is the author of “Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial” and the forthcoming book “The Holocaust, Corporations and the Law.”

Sponsor: Daniel and Phyllis Epstein