THE FORTY-SEVEN FOLDERS: A Novel of State Responsibility (AFRICA V. Book 4)

The forty-seventh folder arrived on a Wednesday. She had not planned to stop at forty-seven. You do not plan the number of folders a twenty-three-year conflict requires. You simply continue opening them.Amina Mbeki-Lwa has spent twenty-three years assembling the evidence. One hundred and seventy-one civilians killed in Kishishe, November 2022. Seven million displaced. A conflict documented in forty-seven folders, fourteen thousand documents, and the margins of every report she has ever read.Now she has a case.When a retired Rwandan intelligence officer contacts her with thirty-seven documents he retained from his service — and a terminal diagnosis — Amina has what she has been building toward for two decades: a jurisdictional foundation that holds, an evidentiary architecture that works, and a legal framework that could finally hold a patron state accountable for the actions of its proxy.She needs one more thing. She needs Dr. C. Frost.The Forty-Seven Folders follows the preparation and proceedings of a fictional case before the International Court of Justice — DRC v. Rwanda — in which a team of lawyers attempts what international law has never accomplished: proving that a powerful state bears legal responsibility for the atrocities committed by the armed group it finances, arms, and directs.The characters are fiction. The law is real. The dead are real. The gap between what the law says and what the law does is the subject of this novel.For readers of John Grisham, Philippe Sands, and anyone who has ever wondered why the powerful are never held accountable.Cor P.M. van Houte, Doctor of Laws, is an international lawyer. Read more