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6 - Atrocity, law, humanity: punishing human rights violators

from Part II - Interconnections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

By
Gerry Simpson
Edited by
Conor Gearty  and
Costas Douzinas
Conor Gearty
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
Costas Douzinas
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Summary

François de Menthon, one of the French Prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1945, was assigned the task of defining humanity. The context was a trial in which a more or less new legal category – crimes against humanity – had to be created to encompass the system of abuse and murder instituted by the Nazis in the mid 1930s. This development had a spatial imperative (Nazi crimes committed against Germans in Germany fell outside the category of ‘war crimes’, a category encompassing only acts committed against foreign soldiers or civilians), a temporal imperative (war crimes applied only to acts committed during war and excluded peace-time offences) and a moral imperative (it was believed that an unprecedented level of baseness had been reached and that the response to it required a new language and new law).

In its delineation of crimes against humanity, de Menthon’s opening address to the International Military Tribunal invoked three distinguishable concepts. The first was the idea that certain acts were crimes against human beings regardless of the race, religion, national affiliation or ethnicity of the victims. This was international criminal law in its universalising mode, and it was an inspiration for two 1948 landmarks: The Genocide Convention (in the field of criminal law) and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (in the field of human rights law).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights Law , pp. 114 - 133
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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