in paris during the war, hidden by catholic families in the town of saved her. and so this has always been part of my life, and i suspect . was it subconscious or conscious? did you consciously think to yourself, i m an international lawyer and i want to dig deep into notions of accountability and justice ? no, it didn t happen like that at all. i d made the terrible mistake of doing law at university and i hated it, apart from one teacher, a very lovely yorkshireman called robbiejennings who went on to become the britishjudge at the world court in the hague. and he taught a course on international law and i thought, this is interesting. this is what i want to do. and i just stuck with it, i stayed on, i did a masters, i had some great teachers. and that was what developed my interest in international law. and with your academic hat on, as we look at the nuremberg trials 75 years on from the first set of verdicts, does it strike you that they should be seen as a sort of extraordin
imagined, or any of the other prosecutors would ve imagined, that it would be, in fact, practically never again. the justice that has been delivered since 1945, it was a new invention it s just 75 years old is lopsided justice. it s essentially focused on the vanquished and the weak. and that is a problem, but i think it s going to be seen in the long run and it s a long game as the inevitable start of the system. but why is it a long game? why can you believe optimistically that there is an evolution in place here? because, frankly, what we see is that all of the active current cases on the books of the icc involve poor countries in africa. well, it s even worse than that. if you go onto the website of the international criminal court now, switch it on on your desktop, you will see that every single person who is identified as a defendant is black and from africa. blacks and africans don t have a monopoly on international criminality. well, you ve written extensively on what y
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, where 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 19114, raphael lemkin, a rather wonderful character, was desperately upset that it wasn t on the list of crimes, and so he flew himself to london to get it into the indictment, which is he succeeded in doing as a war crime, but not as a crime on its own. some people looking
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 invented at the same time. crimes against humanity, basically driven by a cambridge professor, her
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 invented at the same time. crimes against humanity,