Geoffrey Robertson - Crimes Against Humanity : The Struggle for Global Justice

Crimes Against Humanity

Crimes Against Humanity

The Struggle for Global Justice

FOURTH EDITION

Geoffrey Robertson QC

NEW YORK
LONDON

For Julius and Georgina

1999, 2000, 2002, 2006, and 2012 by Geoffrey Roberston
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form,
without written permission from the publisher.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections
from this book should be mailed to:
Permissions Department, The New Press,
38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.

Originally published in Great Britain by Allen Lane, 1999
Subsequent editions published in Great Britain
by the Penguin Group in 2000, 2002, 2006, and 2012
This edition published in the United States
by The New Press, New York, 2013
Distributed by Perseus Distribution

ISBN 978-1-59558-863-0 (e-book)
CIP data available

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Appendices

D: Excerpts from the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court

I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus we can gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armemans?

Adolf Hitler to chief commanders and commanding generals,
22 August 1939

I happen to have been born on the day of the Nuremberg judgment 30 September 1946 so the length of my life provides a precise temporal measure of the extent to which the international community has delivered on the momentous promise of that day, namely that crimes against humanity would henceforth be deterred by punishment of their perpetrators. It was the judgment imposed upon the authors of the Holocaust which created international criminal law, a freestanding and universal jurisdiction to prosecute those who direct or assist a crime so heinous that it is against humanity because the very fact that a fellow human being could conceive and commit it demeans every member of the human race, wherever they live and whatever their culture or creed. It is a crime confined to genocide and mass murder and systematic torture, or to atrocious acts of warfare and terror, and it imputes a special responsibility to commanders, organizers and abettors of these crimes be they heads of state or political or military leaders, bureaucrats or theocrats, ideologues or industrialists. Since the perpetrators will generally be powerful enough to be above or beyond the law in their own state, the Nuremberg legacy depends for its fulfilment on the establishment of international institutions of justice with power to end impunity.

Sixty-five years on from that day of judgment, the nations of the world have made a start in devising institutions and procedures which work to protect the most basic of human rights: freedom from state-sponsored murder, torture and terror. This progress has been made mostly since publication of the first edition of Crimes Against Humanity in 1999. The book was fuelled by anger at the seemingly endless barbarities committed with impunity by governments throughout the world, some of which I had observed officially for Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, professionally as a barrister defending dissidents or just casually, as a television viewer. I sought to build, from the straws blowing in the fin de sicle wind (the arrest of Pinochet, the UN courts set up to deal with war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Lockerbie agreement and the Rome Statute for an international criminal court), an argument for a kind of millennial shift, from appeasement to justice, as the dominant factor in world affairs. The evolving force of international human rights law was carrying some compulsion in municipal courts and in an increasing number of international tribunals. The pioneering discovery (law being a science in its content, an art only in its practice) was how the crime against humanity, first defined in the Nuremberg Statute, might become the key to unlocking the closed door of state sovereignty, and to holding political and military leaders responsible for the evils they chose to visit upon humankind.

The preface to the first edition was completed on 24 March 1999, another red-letter day; it began with the British law lords ruling that the Torture Convention had destroyed General Pinochets sovereign immunity, and ended with NATO bombing the sovereign state of Serbia over its ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The promise of Nuremberg, for the first time since 1946, seemed capable of realization. When, a few months later, a UN force landed on the shores of East Timor, to protect its people from massacre by Indonesian militias and to secure their right to self-determination, the era of human rights enforcement seemed to have dawned. It would, in effect, be the third age of human rights: the first had been articulated in the declarations of the American and French Revolutions; the second was ushered in by the Nuremberg judgment and the triptych of treaties it directly inspired the 1948 Universal Declaration and the Geneva and Genocide Conventions. Now, more than a half century on, human rights law was teething at last and in this third age, its teeth would be for biting, not gnashing.

A critical response to the publication of Crimes Against Humanity, in the summer of 1999, nervously concentrated on practicalities rather than principles. Might Pinochets arrest not destabilize democracy in Chile? Would Milosevic ever be surrendered to face his indictment in The Hague? These fears seem risible now. Chiles democracy has gone from strength to strength: in 2006 the nation elected a Pinochet torture victim as president and its courts lifted the old tyrants immunity for crimes of torture and murder. The indictment of Miloevi hastened his fall from power and international pressure forced Serbia to disgorge him to The Hague; the issue before his death was not whether he should be tried, but how he should be tried more effectively. The main ideological objection to the books argument came in Europe from relics of the socialist left who cling still to nation-state sovereignty (Miloevi was its embodiment) as a protection from American interference. From their perspective, enforcing human rights was a euphemism for forcing American freedoms on peoples who should not be allowed to enjoy them. From his perspective, international law was a set of rules that could be imposed upon other countries, but which must never be enforced against Americans.