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Most Latin American states have submitted to the jurisdiction of both the International Criminal Court and the Inter-American human rights system, including the Inter-American Court and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. This allows us to observe and compare the different ways in which a well-institutionalized regional human rights system and an international criminal system work—through different treaties, different interlocutors, and different working methods—toward the same goals. In particular, Colombia and Mexico, both states that are experiencing high levels of violence, allow us to observe the two systems in play at once.

Since the close of the Cold War, the international community has created a variety of legal institutions designed to step in when state justice systems fail to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The ad hoc criminal tribunals, the hybrid tribunals (such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone), the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the use of universal jurisdiction by national courts are among a new generation of courtly mechanisms designed to hold wrongdoers criminally accountable, state justice systems notwithstanding. These mechanisms represent an era of international judicial involvement in what used to be a more exclusively sovereign matter—the response to mass crimes against civilian populations. Accordingly, they have engendered a slew of scholarship devoted to analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, individually and as a group.