Daniel Terris - The Trials of Richard Goldstone

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Terris, Daniel, author.

Title: The trials of Richard Goldstone / Daniel Terris.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018012694 | ISBN 9780813599960 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Goldstone, Richard. | JudgesSouth AfricaBiography. | Prosecution (International law)Biography.

Classification: LCC KTL110.G65 T47 2018 | DDC 347.68/03334 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012694

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright 2019 by Daniel Terris

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

N THE BALLROOM of the Grand Hotel Amrth Kurhaus, champagne glasses clinked and chandeliers sparkled. It was May 25, 2009, and the occasion had brought together the leading lights of the international community in The Hague, the capital of the Netherlands. Judges from the worlds most influential global courts mingled with ambassadors from thirty-two nations, alongside scholars, activists, and journalists. They had assembled in this lavish room to celebrate a cause and the man who embodied it. That man was Justice Richard Goldstone, and on this evening, the MacArthur Foundation was conferring upon him its prestigious Award for International Justice.

Images of war and brutality flashed on the screen above the podium. A block of bombed-out apartment buildings. A fiery explosion. Rifle fire and a man slumping to the ground. Women in headscarves bearing portraits of loved ones. Human suffering cries out for justice, intoned a voiceover. The worst crimes must not go unpunished. The camera cut to a white man in his sixties with a wide round face, spectacles, and a neatly knotted necktie. When I think back on the war criminals that I was involved with, Richard Goldstone shared in his clipped South African accent, I think that what they all really have in common is that on the face of it they were all ordinary human beings like you and me. Anybody is capable of doing terrible things, given the circumstances.

Jonathan Fanton, the president of the MacArthur Foundation, took the podium to hail the evenings honoree as a man of courage, a pathbreaker, the leading of figure of a singular global development. Few had done more than Richard Goldstone to bring the worlds worst regimes and individuals to justice: as a widely respected judge, as a leading figure in the transition to democracy of his native South Africa, as a lawyer in The Hague prosecuting the perpetrators of war crimes in the Balkans and Rwanda. He held honorary degrees from a dozen prestigious universities. The city of The Hague had named him as its first peace philosopher. In presenting the MacArthur Award, Fanton touted the judges moral authority and legal credibility and proclaimed that his unquestioned competence and integrity won the faith of the world. In his tribute, Fanton channeled Goldstones hope, an aspiration shared by the hundreds of distinguished men and women who had gathered to celebrate his work: No longer will dictators or oppressive governments be able to violate the fundamental rights of citizens with impunity. We are moving into a new and different world. The twenty-first century will witness the growth of an international criminal justice system and victims of war crimes will no longer be ignored.

The audience stood and gave a prolonged and refined ovation that managed to combine enthusiasm and dignity, and as the man of the hour himself arrived at the podium and surveyed the applauding crowd, a broad grin spread across his face. These were Goldstones people, and this was his moment. Just two decades earlier, international criminal justice had scarcely existed. Now it was an established fact, and he was happy to savor the occasion. His work had brought him face to face with some of the ugliest truths of human behavior, yet he had managed to preserve throughout a sense of uplift and possibility. For any human endeavor to succeed, there have to be optimists running it, he told the assembly in the ballroom. If human beings were pessimists, wed all be in caves.