Auschwitz Never Again by Louise Arbour, International Crisis Group 1:38am 22nd Nov, 2009   I do not have a personal experience or family background that directly tied my life to Auschwitz or the Shoah. Yet in many ways, much of my professional life has occurred in its shadow. Whether as a lawyer and a judge in Canada deeply committed to the Rule of Law, whether during my tenure as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, or as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, I have always understood “Never Again” not as the acknowledgment of a new reality but as a call to action, a challenge to the indifference with which we so often respond to atrocious suffering from which we believe we will always be immune.    That indifference attained unconscionable heights in preventing the Shoah and in failing to stop it once the extermination became known. From where I stand, it is painfully apparent that this was also facilitated by a legal system that became complicit in its own erosion, with legal order supporting oppression, losing any form of moral compass.    Maybe because I had no family history tying me to the horrors of the Second World War, I have always thought that I was approaching issues in a clinical, rational, dispassionate way. I believed that my own response to the Never Again call for action was grounded in a professional training and a moral choice, not in a more intangible, emotional reaction based on one’s complex humanity.    I was confronted with a different reality whe n I first went to Rwanda on the eve of becoming the Chief Prosecutor for the Tribunal. This was in the fall of 1996. I went to visit a massacre site, where the bodies had been left lying and decomposing in the school in which men, women and children had been slaughtered.    After my visit to the site, I was driven back to Kigali where I had an appointment with the President. I first went back to my hotel and had a long shower to wash away the odour of death that I felt had not left me. At the president’s residence, I was asked to sit in a waiting room and a young woman brought me a guest book to sign. I wrote something in the book, trying to capture the extraordinary turn that my professional life had taken. I took a few minutes to write something and gave her back the book. She soon came back to me and said could I please sign and date my comments. I did, and she left again. She returned shortly, looking very puzzled, and said I had written the wrong date. We were in late September 1996. Under my name, I had written April 6 1994. The night the genocide began. I was shocked. I understood for the first time the extraordinary grip that the past can have on you, once you realize that you are part of it.    I want to return to my professional realm and discuss with you the remarkable strides we have made though the law to build the foundation for a world in which the promise of “Never Again” has greater resonance. In particular, I want to share with you my own sense about the importance of justice in helping honor that promise.    The idea of justice, and in particular of personal criminal responsibility for crimes almost too great to be attributed to a single individual, was captured powerfully in the creation of the Nuremberg Tribunal, and carried through in modern times by, among other things, the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court. It is one of the most powerful legacies to have emerged from the human ruins of the Shoah.    It may seem obscene to claim a positive legacy from the Shoah, and worse to draw rudimentary moral lessons from moral failures of this magnitude. And it may seem absurd to claim that a worthy legal system could emerge form the ultimate failure of the Rule of Law and its pathetic surrender to brutality.    But I suggest to you that the universal moral impulse that led to the a modern concept of justice is very much anchored in what Auschwitz has come to represent: a call for justice, not just in the narrow sense of punishment, retribution and deterrence but rather in the broadest possible sense, encompassing sustained and universal progress in the domain of human rights, particularly in the commitment to ideals of equality, non-discrimination, and the protective umbrella of civil, political economic, social and cultural rights.    Let’s consider for a moment the huge distance we have travelled as an international community in the last 65 years by looking at what has happened on the international scene – in terms of law, policy, and institutions.    In early 1945, there was no United Nations, no European Union, no Council of Europe, no human rights law, no international criminal law, no refugee law, and only the rudimentary framework of the law of armed conflict. There were no human rights courts, no international criminal tribunals. Both in domestic legal systems and in international law states ruled supreme. International laws and institutions were few and weak, and the individual human right to dignity was a notion rooted in religious or moral teachings, but nothing more than an aspiration, poorly reflected in the law, and of course unenforcable as a right.    That legal world, as it still existed at the start of 1945, is in part the one that enabled the Shoah to occur.    In this respect we might ask: what choice did the international community have at that time but to reassess its fundamental beliefs concerning what was right and good about the international legal and institutional order?    With this broad question in mind, what I propose to do this evening, very briefly, is to explore two particularly significant legacies that emerged from the Shoah:    1. The emergence of human rights as an idea and as a body of law, with its accompanying set of institutions; and    2. The idea of individual justice after genocide, as embodied in international criminal law and institutions.    International Human Rights Law: The Rise of State Responsibility    For centuries, and right up to the end of the Second World War, public international law accorded individuals few meaningful rights. States were the only lawmakers and the only subjects of international law, and they could generally treat their own citizens as they wished. International law was truly the law of sovereign states; individuals and groups of individuals had no standing in the international order.    It was precisely the events of the Shoah that crystallized political will behind a new international norm of human rights. If there had been any doubt that some of the worst atrocities are committed by governments against their own people, that doubt was irredeemably shattered by the Holocaust. The events of Second World War made a link between international law and individual rights unavoidable.    The first major source of international human rights law was, of course, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted without dissent in 1948 by the UN General Assembly. The UDHR is premised on the principle of the equality of all human beings in rights and dignity. It goes on to articulate the right to life, liberty and security of the person, and to further enumerate a series of rights that in a sense unpack Franklin Roosevelt’s inspired prescription of freedom from fear and freedom from want.    Yet the Universal Declaration was not a binding treaty. For that reason, most human rights supporters saw it as a major compromise. They had wanted a legally binding Bill of Rights.    * Visit the link beloe to access the complete speech by Louise Arbour, President & CEO, of the International Crisis Group to the Dutch Auschwitz Committee. Visit the related web page
	Next (more recent) news item
	Next (older) news item