Auditorium A2, Maison de la paix, Geneva
US Ambassador David Scheffer will talk on his experience as the US Ambassador, Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes and his new book entitled The Sit Room: in the Theater of War and Peace (Oxford University Press).
The Sit Room brings you inside the secretive Situation Room of the White House, the most important deliberative room in the world, during the early 1990s when the author was one of the policymakers who framed the Clinton Administration's policy towards the bloody Balkans War. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and his own notes, David Scheffer, who later became America's first Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, weaves the true story of how policy options were debated in the Sit Room among the highest national security officials. The road to a final peace deal in late 1995 came at the high price of the murderous siege of Sarajevo and ethnic cleansing of mostly Bosnian Muslims from their homes and towns, including the genocide of Srebrenica's men and teenage boys.
About the Speaker
David Scheffer was the first US Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues (1997-2001). He negotiated the establishment of five war crimes tribunals during the 1990s and continues to write and lecture about his life work on “atrocity crimes,” a term he coined and that is now commonly used to describe genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. He led the US delegation negotiating the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court. His award-winning book, All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton, 2012), recounts the turbulent eight years of atrocities and tribunal-building during the Clinton Administration in which he worked. His latest book, The Sit Room: in the Theater of War and Peace (Oxford, 2019), takes the reader into the Situation Room of the White House, where Scheffer served on the Deputies Committee from 1993 to 1997, and the highly secret discussions, now declassified, that occurred there to end the Bosnian war.
Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law
Director, Center for International Human Rights
“US Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues (1997-2001)”
“U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Expert for U.N. Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials (2012-2018)”