As Donald Trump is set to be inaugurated as president of the United States, we take a look at the landscape in federal courts for cases dealing with atrocity crimes.

In 2022, just after Ukraine’s president Zelensky addressed Congress, a bill was passed strengthening the War Crimes Act to allow the US to put on trial anyone in their territory suspected of war crimes, even if the crime was committed overseas and even if the victim was not American. 

Under the previous version of that law, authorities in the United States could only prosecute war crimes if the alleged perpetrator or victim were a US national, which would have meant that if a Russian soldier who committed war crimes against Ukrainian nationals came to the United States, they would be able to escape prosecution for their crimes abroad. 

Carmen Cheung Ka-Man is the Executive Director of the Center for Justice and Accountability and she’s been thinking a long time about how to use what’s available in the US system to get justice for crimes like torture. She spoke about how her organisation’s work helps kick-start domestic justice movements.

We also asked Carmen about a new case involving a crime that happened during the Salvadorian Civil War – about 40 years ago – and it’s one of the “most iconic crimes” that took place during that civil war – the killing of four Dutch journalists who were there to report on the human cost of the conflict.

Her reading recommended was Human Acts by Han Kang, who recently won the Nobel Prize for literature.

This podcast has been produced as part of a partnership with JusticeInfo.net, an independent website in French and English covering justice initiatives in countries dealing with serious violence. It is a media outlet of Fondation Hirondelle, based in Lausanne, Switzerland.