2B RED: Justice will be done (hopefully)🍋
2B RED: Justice will be done (hopefully)🍋
How my summer reading led me to a past hero of international law
Summertime always seems like a good chance to catch up on reading — "the rainy day at the bach" syndrome. The bedside table creaks under the load of books, some started, some half-read, and some awaiting there, because a friend or colleague said: "you really need to read this".
As I slowly leave the late Victorian era and move at glacial velocity into the digital era and the world of devices, the books now accumulate in my Kindle. It is too easy to go on to Amazon.com and "Buy now with one click", but not so easy to find the time to whittle away at the 231 books in my Kindle library.
My summer challenge is compounded by receiving the lists of "must reads" from such organisations as NZIER (the PM's Summer reading list) and The Economist (the best books of 2023)1.
This edition of 2B RED is a sample of what I have been reading over the summer.
The “special operation” conducted by Comrade Putin in the Ukraine continues its tragic, bloody, pointless way. And South Africa's move, doubtless well-intentioned, to bring a case of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice has brought international law pertaining to armed conflicts into focus.
This prompted me to dig a little deeper — and quickly the name Sir Hersch Lauterpacht emerged. He is widely regarded as one of the most significant scholars of international law in the 20th century, and the father of the International Court of Justice.
It is worth reflecting for a moment on his early years.
He was born in 1897 to a Jewish family in the village of Żółkiew, the Yiddish name for what is now a town of Zhovkva, located in the Lviv region of western Ukraine. It was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and historically is part of the Eastern European province of Galicia (sometimes called East Galicia; not to be confused with Galicia in Spain).
A digression into geopolitics
At this point I will diverge to sketch the geopolitical history of the area, as some appreciation of the changes over the centuries is important context for any understanding of the present conflict in Ukraine.
A classic anecdote of Eastern Europe is of an elderly relative (a grandmother, a great uncle) who was born in Poland, married in the Soviet Union, and died in Ukraine – without ever leaving their village. While often told now for comic purposes, this would have been a reality for many in the mid 20th century.
(An appalling chapter in the troubled history of the region is graphically described by Timothy Snyder in Blood Lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2022).)
But back to our hero
After schooling in a humanist gymnasium, Lauterpacht enrolled in the University at Lviv (or Lemberg, as it was known by its German name). After World War I, Lviv was again under Polish control and the situations for Jews become intolerable. Consequently Lauterpacht moved to Vienna to continue his legal studies. Throughout his years as a student he founded and led various Zionist student organisation, culminating in his appointment as leader of the World Federation of Jewish Students.
He eventually settled in England in 1923 and, after completing a PhD in 1925, was soon an assistant lecturer at the London School of Economics. This was followed by a professorial appointment at Cambridge University in 1938. He was appointed as a judge at the International Court of Justice in 1954, a position he held until his death in 1960, and received a Knighthood in 1956. He played a critical role in the British team of prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials.2
His legal philosophy centred on the rights of the individual. This underpinning premise arises from Natural Law, which holds that people have inherent rights. International law should therefore give priority to individuals rather than the state. The state he argued, did not have total sovereignty over its citizens to do to them as it wished. He wrote a draft of an International Bill of Rights of Man which contributed to the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights published by the United Nations in 1948. And he wrote in 1948 the draft of a declaration of independence for the newly created state of Israel.
At Cambridge University The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law is named after him. His son, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, CBE, KC, founded the centre and was its first director.
The story of Lauterpacht is part of a broader picture captured by Philippe Sands in his memoir East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (2016). The book is a fascinating personal story, interwoven with European history, and the legal origins of international laws covering crimes against humanity and genocide.
Sands is a leading academic lawyer at University College London, and a leading specialist in war crimes. His family came from Lviv, and in 2010 he was invited to the university there to give a guest lecture. Of that visit he writes:
Astonishingly, I also discovered that the inventors of those two legal terms ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’ — Professor Hersch Lauterpacht of Cambridge University and Dr Raphael Lemkin, a former Polish prosecutor — happened to have studied at the very university which had invited me to give my lecture.
It is beyond tragedy that the land and city which gave birth to these definitions is once again the victim of the most terrible international crimes — this time being waged by President Putin in the name of Russia.
As a product of his return to Lviv, Philippe Sands recently published City of Lions: Portrait of a City in Two Acts: Lviv, Then and Now. The reference in the title to two acts refers to the fact the book, as well as telling Sands’ modern story, includes a reprinted essay by Jósef Wittlin, a Polish poet and essayist born in 1896.
Today, the international legal framework is again very much to the fore. Will the Nuremberg Trials be repeated to address alleged criminal events in Ukraine and Gaza?
By Grant Scobie
See yearendlists.com for an ungated list of The Economist’s best books for 2023.
Additional background from: International Judicial Monitor - Leading Figures in International Law (2006); and Wikipedia.