By: Geoffrey Robertson

Paperback

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Geoffrey Robertson's Crimes Against Humanity is a superb and highly influential account of the history of the human rights movement up to the present day. From the French Revolution and the Nuremberg trials to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, Robertson traces the developing concept of human rights and shows how far we still have to go. His inspiring narrative is both a masterly history and a clarion call to the global justice movement.

About The Author

Geoffrey Robertson QC has had a distinguished career as a trial counsel and human rights advocate. He has handled hundreds of death sentence appeals; prosecuted Hastings Banda and defended Salman Rushdie; acted for terrorist suspects at the Old Bailey and for Human Rights Watch in the proceedings against General Pinochet. He was counsel to the Antiguan Royal Commission which exposed arms traffic to the Medellin drugs cartel and was involved in training the judges to try Saddam Hussein. He serves as an appeal judge for the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone and has authored landmark decisions on the limits of amnesties, the illegality of recruiting child soldiers and other critical issues in the development of international criminal law.

Geoffrey Robertson is founder and head of Doughty Street Chambers and sits as a recorder (part-time judge) in London, where he is a Master of the Middle Temple and visiting professor in human rights law at Queen Mary College. His books include Freedom, the Individual and the Law; Does Dracula Have AIDS?; Media Law; and an acclaimed memoir, The Justice Game. In 2005 he published The Tyrannicide Brief - the story of how Cromwell's lawyers mounted the first trial of a head of state. He has made many television and radio programmes, notably Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals, and has won a Freedom of Information award for his writing and broadcasting. He lives in London with his wife, the author Kathy Lette, and their two children.

The notion that individuals, wherever in the world they live, possess a few basic powers which no political order can remove, has had a momentous impact at two points in modern history. The first, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, was in every way revolutionary: it inspired and justified both the American battle for independence from Britain and the overthrow of the despotic monarchy in France. It endowed these upheavals with a political meaning far beyond the republics which were their immediate object, by establishing the liberty of the individual as a precondition of and restriction on the power of the State. This was not unique to America and France: in other societies limitations had been imposed by tradition or cultural convention, or (most notably in Britain) by compact and common law, but what was truly groundbreaking was the constitutional enumeration of rights which the citizen could enforce against the government by taking it to court. But the notion that 'rights' might belong to anyone, anywhere, as a human inheritance was ridiculed by nineteenth-century philosophers and when the majority of Western powers agreed to outlaw slavery, this was attributed to shared moral generosity rather than to any recognition of an inalienable individual right not to be held in bondage or servitude. It dawned on no political leader, even after the carnage of the First World War, that international institutions might tell states how to treat their nationals - the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice were untroubled by 'human rights' until Hitler rendered them irrelevant. At this point, the individual had no rights in international law, which dealt with treaties and agreements between states and was completely inaccessible to their citizens.

The Holocaust was a revelation that was to change this for ever. It crystallized the Allied war aims, and called forth an international tribunal- the court at Nuremberg - to punish individual Nazis for the barbarities they had authorized against German citizens. These charges - called, for the first time, 'crimes against humanity' - were distinct from the 'war crimes' the Axis partners had inflicted upon Allied soldiers and prisoners-of-war. The logic of the crime against humanity, first defined in Article 6(c) of the Nuremberg Charter, was that future state agents who authorized torture or genocide against their own populations were criminally responsible, in international law, and might be punished by any court capable of catc9ing them. For the first time, it could be said that individuals had a 'right' to be treated with a minimum of civility by their own governments, which 'right' all other governments had a correlative duty to uphold by trying the torturers who fell into their hands, or else by setting up international courts to punish them. This was the legal legacy of Nuremberg, supplemented by a United Nations system which promised institutional support for a 'Universal Declaration of Human Rights' approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations. The second great moment for human rights - the creation of a process by which it could emerge from the domestic laws and constitutions of a few countries into a universal system affording some minimum protection to everyone, everywhere - had arrived. At the Palais Chaillot in Paris, on IQ December 1948, the president of the General Assembly, Dr H. V. Evatt (the Australian foreign minister), announced the advent of a new international law of human rights, for the first time transcending the laws and customs of independent sovereign states: 'millions of men, women and children, all over the world, many miles from Paris and New York, will turn for help, guidance and inspiration to this document'.

But this moment was short-lived. The evolutionary process for international human rights law, commenced so confidently, was frozen almost to a standstill by the Cold War. The power blocs did not deny the idea of universal human rights - with shameless hypocrisy, they contentedly signed convention after convention on the subject - so long as no meaningful enforcement action could ever be taken. 'Human rights' became a phrase incorporated into insults traded between the Great Powers, as they secretly vied for the support of dictatorships which comprehensively violated them. The four decades between I948 and the collapse of communism may be characterized - and stigmatized - as the lipservice era for human rights, when diplomats strove to ensure that they could never be meaningfully asserted against a nation state. There were times - the early days of Jimmy Carter's presidency, for example - when the idea resonated before succumbing to realpolitik, and undoubtedly the 'help, guidance and inspiration' of human rights was an important factor in the ultimate failure of some regimes notorious for denying them: the military juntas of Latin America, the apartheid system in South Africa, the USSR and its puppet states of eastern Europe. But all that happened to human rights law over those four decades was a series of academic exercises, honing and refining and putting in place international conventions - most notably the twin Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic and Social Rights - which were marvels of modern. diplomacy: none of the states which signed them intended them to work.

ISBN: 9780141037288
ISBN-10: 0141037288
Series: Popular Penguins
Audience: General
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 800
Published: 1st September 2008
Dimensions (cm): 18.1 x 11.2
Weight (kg): 18.6