In the first place, I welcome you warmly to the Peace Palace. I am the director of the Carnegie Foundation, a foundation which owns and manages the Palace and which is the host to the Peace Palace Library. So it is a great pleasure to see all of you here, in this new part of the Palace, the Academy and Library Building.

In the beginning of this month we commemorated the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The 9th of November 1989 not only marked the end of the Cold War but also the opening up of the possibility of joining global, and regional, economic activities and institutions for millions of people east of the wall - and indeed elsewhere in the world, from India to Latin America. This has levelled the global economic playing field. It has “flattened” our world. For some, this marked the beginning of the globalization process. But our world has become “horizontal” in a more fundamental sense and over a longer period of time. Human relationships are now far more than in the past determined by horizontal connections with like-minded others across borders, including virtual connections through cyberspace and mass-media, and much less by vertical lines of authority within a closed society.

My name is Johannes Houwink ten Cate; I am a historian of the Holocaust and I am interested in other modern genocides as well. It would seem appropriate to discuss with you how historians and legal experts have interacted in the past fifty years in dealing with the Holocaust and other modern genocides – insofar as these genocides have been formally acknowledged as such by international courts. So, I will limit my observations to the Holocaust, to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and to the genocidal incident that took place in Srebrenica in 1995.

During the Second World War, the government of the Netherlands realized that it had no adequate penalization system in place for wartime offences. Thus, the Criminal Law Wartime Occupation Decree of 22 December 1943 (BBS, Stb. D 61) was enacted to penalize offences committed during wartime. This emergency legislation was recognized as legally valid after the war. It then took until the Wartime Offences Act of 10 July 1952 (effective date 5 August 1952, the “WOS”) for wartime offences to be subjected to specific penalties. This was followed by separate statutes penalizing genocide (Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 2 July 1964, effective date 24 October 1970) and torture (Torture Convention Implementation Act of 29 September 1988, effective date 20 January 1989).

I propose to present a bird's eye view of the eventful life led by the famous Dutch jurist and statesman, Hugo Grotius. This I will do by discussing five of his portraits. These portraits have been made in five subsequent phases of his career. As a scholar who enjoyed a reputation that steadily expanded and that soon transcended the boundaries of the Dutch Republic, he went to the trouble of ordering famous artists, some of which were his friends, to immortalize him in copper or paint.

Erasmus is generally regarded as a model of tolerance and equanimity. As such, he very well could have an educational part to play in the ideology of equality and the non-discriminatory principle of our modern rule of law as embedded in Article 1 of the Dutch Constitution since 1983 which claims equality for all people on the Dutch territory. On the face of it, it would certainly seem worthwhile to examine whether Erasmus influenced the law of his age and might therefore also be relevant to views on the law of our present age. A closer look at this idealised view of Erasmus shows, however, that some qualifications are in order. It was not very long ago that some valid accusations of anti-Semitism were made against him: anti-Semitic statements were found in some of his letters. It should be noted that he is no exception in this: Luther, his contemporary, is also known to have made statements in a similar vein.

As the practice of law crosses national (and linguistic) borders with increasing frequency, the need for tools that facilitate the transnational practice of law becomes more acute. Bilingual legal dictionaries (BLDs) are one critical such tool, as they offer access to legal systems as well as the languages of these systems. Unfortunately, librarians have offered scant criticism of BLDs, many of which are not particularly useful. This article summarizes critical problems with BLDs and offers an approach to resolving these problems by focusing upon the quality of the entries, or definitions, that BLDs provide.