but your second point is an important one. since 1945, we ve had four crimes. the old one, war crimes 19th century. then three invented at nuremberg crime of aggression, waging illegal war, genocide, crimes against humanity. they all focus on the protection of the human. there s a gap and we re facing that gap right now in the face of climate change, the face of biodiversity, marine pollution. there s a gap in relation to the protection of the environment it is not protected by the criminal law. and the proposalfor a new crime of ecocide which, incidentally, is notjust supported by me but by the pope, secretary general of the united nations, various countries around the world and i think it will happen. it is fair to say it s supported by people rhetorically, without having the deep legal knowledge that you have and i would put to you that if you pursue a legal action which, in all sort of realistic scenarios is never going to bring a result, you re actually bringing the lega
like a tonne of bricks. it s disconcerting. and that s a change of values. today, it would be done differently. here s a quote from claudia hyde she works for the holocaust memorial day trust and she spends a lot of time thinking about the contemporary resonances of nuremberg, and she says this, justice cannot be secured without truth and for survivors, the judgement at nuremberg were not the whole truth . no judgement is the whole truth and nuremberg was like any other tribunal in that sense. it s a partial truth it s what the judges decide. for example, the judges decided they couldn t look at anything that happened before 1939 because of the way the statute had been drafted. they didn t look up crimes that may have been committed by the allies. they only focused on these 2a defendants. so it was a snapshot of a much bigger picture. so i think that quote has truth to it but that doesn t undermine the whole.
i want to bring you back to this point about genocide, and you say it was snuck into the charge sheet as a subheading. but perhaps there is an argument to say crimes against humanity was a more powerful argument against the nazis. even then, genocide in that the nazis wanted you, all of us, to see the world in terms of blood, ethnicity, tribe and the resistance to that, the response to that perhaps should be triumph. it is to say, no, that is not the way to see human beings. human beings should be seen each one of us as an individual, not defined by our blood and our race and therefore, we are going to pursue you for crimes against humanity first, rather than for the heinous racial crime that you committed too . you ll know that that resonates very powerfully with me. i ve thought a lot about this, i ve written a book about it, i ve looked at the origins. you have these two crimes
this is bbc news. we ll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour as newsday continues straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk i m stephen sackur. 75 years ago, the first nuremberg trial of nazi war criminals came to an end. the groundbreaking international tribunal handed down 12 death sentences. in the years that followed, there were hopes that in evolving mechanism of internationaljustice would deter and punish further heinous acts of mass murder and genocide. my guest is international lawyer and author philippe sands. 75 years on from nuremberg, is the world any better at delivering justice for the worst of crimes?
of verdicts, does it strike you that they should be seen as a sort of extraordinary positive landmark or do you now focus on some of their shortcomings? no, it was a revolutionary moment. this had never happened before in human history that the leaders of a state, germany vanquished, should be put on trial before an international tribunal this was a completely new thing. and as part of that process, new crimes were invented genocide, the killing of groups, crimes against humanity, the killing of individuals. there s a problem, of course, these crimes did not exist in 1939 or 1942 as such, and so they were applied retroactively. well, they weren t on the charge sheet, were they, genocide was not on the charge sheet in 1945? genocide was a subheading of war crime, they sort of snuck it in. the guy who invented the concept in autumn of 1944, raphael lemkin, a rather wonderful character, was desperately upset that it wasn t on the list of crimes,