I am posting from the 2nd Annual International Humanitarian Law Dialogs meeting which began yesterday at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.For those who don’t know, Chautauqua was started in 1874 as an educational experiment in vacation learning for the mind, spirit and body. Join us next year, at the glorious historic Athenaeum Hotel, after taking in the last week of the official season, with the theme "The History of Liberty." (See all about Chautauqua here.)
The theme of this year's 2nd Dialogs is "The Genocide Convention: A 60th Anniversary Celebration"; the pervasive question, the tradeoffs between peace and justice.
The opening speaker was Omar Ismael, the Darfurian who started the ENOUGH! Project. As to the current political discussion of the potential risk to peacemaking of the recent ICC indictment of President al-Bashir, he asked (posing a question that echoed a prior IntLawGrrls post):
'What peace? What peace will be disrupted by the indictment, six years into the war?'
Almost as Ismael spoke, there were new attacks on the refugee camps in Darfur (as the end of the Olympics marked the end of international leverage over China, and the start of the Democratic National Convention marked official U.S. preoccupation with its November elections).
Ismael continued:
'Why don’t the creators of the ICC defend it? Where are the Europeans? Why allow Sudan to control the dialogue?'
In his view, there are peace-justice tradeoffs, but “without justice there will never be peace.”
The core speakers are the international criminal prosecutors:
Nuremberg veterans Whitney Harris, Henry King and Benjamin Ferencz, as well as Serge Brammertz (ICTY), Hassan Jallow (ICTR), David Crane (Special Court for Sierra Leone), Stephen Rapp (Sierra Leone), Fatou Bensouda (ICC) (left) and Robert Petit (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia). Their dialogs yesterday were public sessions (private sessions are today) over the course of two panels: one an "Around the World Report" moderated by Leila Sadat (Washington University School of Law) and the other on :Atrocity and Genocide: The Challenge of Semantics" moderated by Michael Scharf (Case Western University School of Law).Among the matters discussed:
► Whether genocide is and/or should be referred to as the “crime of crimes.” Ben Ferencz answered, simply and eloquently, that illegal war making – the criminal aggression that remains purposefully undefined in the Rome Statute – is the ultimate crime, as the root of genocide and other international crimes.
► Whether international criminal justice really can be said to have a deterrent effect: views differed markedly, but most agreed the primary focus should be on accountability rather than deterrence.
► What possibly can be the appropriate sentence in a genocide conviction: the death penalty? life imprisonment? something less than life in exchange for cooperation with prosecutors? The best answer, in my view, went unspoken (though obviously understood): no sentence can match the crime, and what matters is that the sentence results from justice rather than summary execution, as Russia and England urged for Nazi officers pre-Nuremberg.
► Finally, based on comments from several, watch the ICC and what it might do with Russia/Georgia.
What prompted the most talk in the halls was the Q&A session following the luncheon address by Clint Williamson (right), U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues. The address itself was (understandably) a scripted, optimistic description of U.S. advances in international criminal law. Henry King immediately asked him (cross-examined him, really) whether, in light of the ICC and Guantánamo situations, there was not “some hypocrisy” in his remarks about U.S. advances. Surprisingly, Ambassador Williamson agreed, making several remarks along the lines of "I agree with you. … We’ve taken a black eye. … The next administration will have a lot to do to repair things.” Ambassador Williamson emphasized our “ultimately robust system” and complimented (my word) the courts for becoming “more interventionist on Guantánamo.” When asked about the tension between peace and justice in Uganda/Sudan, he offered his view – cautioning that others in the administration do not necessarily agree – that “the ideal way to deal with the Lord’s Resistance Army and Joseph Kony" is “to see Kony arrested and sent to the ICC.”Tomorrow: The 2nd Chautauqua Declaration of the international criminal prosecutors, past and present.
