Richard Goldstone: War crimes are the concern of all humanity

Taken from a lecture by the chair of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo at the London School of Economics

Not many years ago, and certainly at the end of the Second World War, the question of a rule of law for the international community would have been meaningless. It was not something that would have made any sense to anyone – not to international lawyers, sociologists or economists. Possibly science fiction writers might have thought about it, but it was not a topic of any academic interest.

The main reason was that human rights were not relevant to international law, or to the international community. Before the Second World War, the way governments treated their own citizens – or, rather, mistreated their own citizens – was regarded as their own internal affair. That continued to be the position in the immediate post-war years.

I remember very clearly the way that the South African government was able to raise sovereignty in defence of apartheid and the indignities, discrimination and oppression to which it subjected the majority of the people of our country.

The changes that came about were a direct consequence of the Holocaust. The Nazi genocide so shocked the conscience of decent people throughout the world that more and more governments came to accept that the way individuals were treated, even within the boundaries of sovereign state, was the business of all humankind.

The turning point was Nuremberg. Little could the leaders of the victorious powers anticipate how important a decision it was to put the Nazi leaders on trial. It had consequences way beyond the imaginations of any of the people who were involved. Firstly, the new crime of genocide came to be defined. Nobody had thought in terms of people having a criminal intent, the purpose of which was to obliterate, to wipe out, a whole people or part of a people.

Perhaps even more important than that was the invention of a second international crime, namely crimes against humanity. This was a new concept, a concept that was founded on the recognition that some crimes are so serious and egregious that they constitute crimes against not only the direct victims; against not only the people or the laws of the country in which they were committed; but against all humankind.

It follows that any people, any country, is entitled to bring the perpetrators of such crimes to justice. The concept of crimes against humanity was really a means of recognising universal jurisdiction. As international crimes, they may be tried by the courts of any country and, by the same token, by international courts. This concept of crimes against humanity has changed the face of international human rights and international criminal jurisprudence.

Considerable progress has been made in respect of the recognition of universal jurisdiction and the prosecution of international crimes. It is necessary that this development continues, and I optimistically believe that it will, because it is the only way to deter people from committing the sorts of crimes that made the 20th century as bloody as it was.

If we are to proceed along this road – and it is a winding, difficult road, with many obstacles – it will be because the democracies want it to happen. The dictatorships, the countries that don't respect your human rights, don't want international justice. They don't want international criminal courts, and for good reason: they fear them. They know that it is there that they will be judged, and that it is by those judges, in those courts, that they are going to be punished, so they don't want it.

The pressure of public opinion has got us to where we are at the moment, and it is public opinion in the democracies that will continue this movement, and make it politically essential for governments to ensure that war criminals, wherever they may be, are brought to justice.