 I'm going to go and sit at the back, too. Good evening, and welcome to the School of Oriental and African Studies. Thank you very much for coming this evening where we anticipate a really fantastic debate about international criminal trials. My name is Dr Steve Hopgood from the Politics Department and I'm going to chair this evening. I'm going to run through a few housekeeping things, first of all, then introduce our panellists and give you some idea of the format ac nid o'n meddwl am y cyfnod dweud. Ymddangos. Yn ymddangos yma wedi'u llif ymddangos, ychydig ar y dyfod am y cyfnod. Efo'r bwysig ymddangos. Felly, mae'n meddwl am y llai o'r ffordd. Felly, nid o'r blwysig yma, mae'r bwysig. Mae'r bwysig ar y bwysig ar y bwysig. Mae'r bwysig ar y bwysig. Mae'r bwysig ar y bwysig, yn y bwysig ar y cwrdd. A'r bwysig ar y bwysig. I'm sure there won't be, but if there were to be, please exit the building and then move away from the central quad between the two buildings to the right or the left. Mobile phones please, could you make sure they're all turned off? At the end of the presentation and discussion section there'll be 45 minutes for questions, there'll be a roving microphone, so I'll ask for questions from the audience, someone will bring you the microphone, please wait for the microphone to start talking. I'll also, I'll encourage you to be succinct when it comes to microphones, it comes speaking into the microphone and I'm going to be a pretty tough chair if we get into too many long speeches from the floor. Male and female toilets are just outside that, this is the list I was given. Male and female toilets are just outside the door, just through there, you probably found them and the audience is asked to remain seated until the panelist left the platform. I don't quite know why, whether it's that there's a danger they'll be attacked on the way or you'll throw fruit or something of that sort, I'm not sure. Okay, I'm going to introduce our four panellists. First of all, Marty Koskin-Yemi, who's second from your right over there. Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki and director of the Eric Castrain Institute of International Law and Human Rights. He's one of the world's four most critical legal scholars, having published many influential articles, including one of course related to tonight's event in particular called Beyond Impunity and Show Trials in the Max Planck yearbook in 2002. He's best known to scholars of international relations and international law as the author of The Gentle Civiliser of Nations, The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870 to 1960. But he's also held senior post in the Finnish Diplomatic Service, including director of the International Law Division, and from 2002 to 2006 he was a member of the International Law Commission. There are many, many other of Marty's achievements I could read out, but that's just a few to introduce him, and he'll be speaking first for about 10 minutes. He'll be followed by Stephen Kay, who is a barrister and QC at Nine Bedford Row, and is perhaps the most experienced defence council in the world on cases involving international criminal law. Among the main high-profile cases on which he's been defence counsel to stand out in particular to me, he represented Dusko Tadec in the ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, in 1996, 1997, and of course this really was the first international criminal trial since the Second World War, since Nuremberg and Tokyo. This is where the sort of international justice programme began to really galvanize itself again. And from 2004 he was the lead defence council for Slobodan Milosevic at the ICTY until Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006, and Stephen had also been involved with that case before then as well. He's also currently defence council for the Kenyan deputy prime minister Uhuru Kenyata, who as many of you all know is charged by the ICC prosecutor with crimes against humanity. So we're very happy to welcome Marty and Stephen tonight. Once they've both spoken for about 10 minutes, there will be two responses or questions from our other panellists. First of all Robert Mertfeldt, who's on the far right there. Robert is a PhD student in international law at SOAS whose work begins looking at the alleged genocide of the Herrero in German Southwest Africa, now Namibia. But his research also takes in much wider international justice themes. He's a co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law at SOAS, and has been a visiting research fellow at Columbia University in New York. And I should say, and I'll thank him more fully at the end, but really this entire event, which has been a mammoth effort of organization, is really principally down to Robert putting it together and organizing it. But I'll ask for a thanks for him particularly at the very end of the evening. And immediately on my left here, Polina Levina, was born in Moscow and grew up in Canada and the United Kingdom. She's currently doing her master's in international law at SOAS. Prior to that she worked for 18 months in the office of the prosecutor at the ICC in The Hague, where she worked on the Kenya case and was also involved in the preliminary examination of situations in Nigeria and Afghanistan. So I think you'll agree we have an extremely experienced, unknowledgeable and interesting panel to listen to tonight. The formats as follows, Marty and Stephen will talk for ten minutes each. Robert and Polina will have a five minute opportunity to ask them a few questions and discuss a few things. Then we'll have a little debate between members of the panel, but pretty quickly we'll move on to questions from the audience and we'll start the roving mic going round. Okay, so thank you very much and we'll begin with Marty Koskinemi. Marty, thank you. I'm really sorry I'm not speaking French. I'm really sorry I'm not 87 years old. I have a white hair and a fat cigar. But I still think every trial is a political trial. We don't always feel that when we pay parking tickets we do that without thinking. Every trial is a political trial and a show trial because every trial represents a power, a hierarchy, a set of values and preferences. When we pay the parking ticket we express our agreement to the hierarchy, to the set of values and preferences. We don't think that our rights have been tremendously violated by the powers that be. We understand or think we do the reason for why we do this. Sometimes we don't feel the same way however. There are other kinds of applications of criminal trials in which we feel that something else is going on. The famous or infamous Vyshinsky trials in the 1930s in the Soviet Union or the present trial of Judge Balthasar Garcon in Madrid. We feel that something else is going on there than just paying parking tickets. In the other types of case we feel not only is the accused probably innocent but it may be that the court is guilty and not only the court but the system that the court represents. There are many such cases where we feel this in history. Think of the trial of Socrates. What if Socrates had said no no yes it's true dear elders of Athens. I did say those words and I now recant. I apologize to you the elders of Athens. Well we would feel disappointed there wouldn't be too much drama and the elders of Athens would have won but Socrates didn't do that. Socrates said well I told his accusers I am guilty of what I'm accused of. I drink the poison. Who won in that trial? Do we remember who were the elders of Athens? In legal training lawyers are not always taught to make a difference between parking tickets and Socrates. That clearly must be a terrible mistake in training lawyers. In 1968 the Whitehead now 87 year old French radical lawyer wrote La Stratégie Judiciaire. In that book he pointed to a distinction that I think and I tell my students is something you will have to remember through your lives. This is what Jacques Verges calls the distinction between a trial of connivance and a trial of rapture. A trial of connivance is such that you accept the world of the court. You accept broadly speaking the frame in which the prosecution operates. You accept that yes she was killed. Yes she had a knife in her back but I was on a train at that time I couldn't have done that. So you connive in the overall setting in the criminal system the only thing you say well I didn't do it or my client didn't do it. Socrates didn't in that way. Socrates didn't connive in the system of the Athenian elders. Socrates was engaged for the first time in a trial of rapture saying it's not really me who's to blame here me who am accused. There have been other cases and this little book quite usefully lists some of those. We could add the trial of Dreyfus of course from the French realm perhaps the trial of Leuton and Caly the Milai trial in the United States in the list as well. We would certainly add the trials of the Algerian freedom fighters during the Algerian war. Could we add the trial of Klaus Barbie the white-haired Frenchman behind the cigar would say yes obviously why well because we weren't exceeding we weren't accepting the frame the prosecution offered to us the prosecution of course offered the frame of the second world war the Holocaust the heroic actions of the resistance. Jacques Verges knew that Klaus Barbie could not have been acquitted in this sense it wasn't obviously a show trial. What is a show trial? A show trial is one in which everybody knows that that the accused will not be acquitted. So you do something else like what? Well for instance you show that the acts of which Klaus Barbie the butcher of Leon was accused of when he tortured Jean Moulin to death was where exactly the same actions that the Algerian military used during the time of the Algerian independence war. That's an important point to make. Nuremberg. Nuremberg wasn't about parking tickets either. There was a new order that was being demonstrated but there was some uncertainty about what that new order was linked to what sort of criminal was Hitler and what kind of criminality did the Hitler regime have. In his two and a half hour speech the French prosecutor Francis de Monton mentioned the oppression of the Jews once. When the reel that was famously shown when the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen was opened and the the famous mass graves were shown the British bulldozing the graves open the real spoke of crimes against civilians. When that same film was shown in the Eichmann trial in 1961 in Jerusalem the same film the voice had been changed and now the voice spoke of the Holocaust of the Jews. Trials can be used to show many different things and different prosecutors have interest presenting things differently. What was being shown in the Milosevic trial? In the in her opening speech the prosecutor Carol del Ponte said in a way that we perhaps understand that not the whole nation is on trial only one individual is. Milosevic we understand of course she didn't want to create the impression that the whole of the Serbian nation was on trial but how how true is it that the atrocities were the result of the actions of this one man? What was being put on show there? What was the context that was being shown to the western media and why on earth did she not choose to prosecute the NATO bombings of Belgrade in 1999 as well? So there are always choices to be made and I'm sure my colleagues will be discussing those choices I'm happy to discuss. There are always truths to tell and show trials are about telling the truth. The show trial of course depends on the actions of the accused. When Churchill first heard that there would be trials at the end of the second world war he was puzzled and worried about this and said no no just put them against the wall all of them. Why would he think that? Churchill we would admire the man well he knew the great paradox that he was facing that the Nuremberg prosecutors were facing that the French prosecutors when they believed that the story to be told was only the story of La resistance and that there's no story about Algeria at all that Carla del Ponte thought that there was just one story. The paradox that Churchill knows knew is this. If you let the accused speak there's no telling what the accused might say and it might be very indicting but if you get the accused if you don't let the accused speak then you're engaged in a show trial. Thank you. Thank you Marty. Show trials international criminal justice has come a long way since Nuremberg. Nuremberg is no longer the standard for international criminal justice Nuremberg has been consigned to history. Nuremberg remains a platform upon which people go to look at principles to see how they applied the new international criminal offences which they discovered at Nuremberg crimes against humanity etc that is a place where the academics go for the arguments for the philosophy and for the points of view and regard what took place in Nuremberg as something that could not take place under modern conditions but our show trials are good thing. Do show trials achieve justice? Is the international community at times in pursuit of the new area of law international criminal law often finding itself involved with show trials in a way that they do no credit to victims they do no credit to justice and they do no credit to history. Let's first of all take the Milosevic trial. The Milosevic trial was originally going to be on one indictment, Kosovo. He was indicted upon Kosovo during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Before 1999 and after Dayton there had been no question of Milosevic being charged with anything in relation to the Yugoslavia wars between 1992 to 1995. So what happened? He was indicted by Louise Arbor during the middle period of the NATO bombings of Serbia and at a time to weld public opinion against Serbia and Milosevic and in the clear understanding that all academic as well as legal advice at the time was that the NATO bombing of Serbia in the bid to wage a war against Serbia and Milosevic was illegal. There was no authority under the NATO charter to bomb Serbia in relation to its conduct of its affairs over Kosovo. NATO's charter only gave it the authority to go to the defence of another NATO state and Kosovo was not a NATO state and thereafter act in self-defence of a NATO state and how complicit were our leaders and our politicians and our institutions in Western Europe with this particular plan they were greatly complicit and they invented for themselves a new principle of the right to protect actually that came two years later at a conference in Scaveningen when they were very worried about what they'd done and they decided to get a load of academics together to invent a defence for the NATO countries and that happened in 2001. So from that moment on you had all the beginnings of a NATO attempt to get out of trouble and the use of a show trial against someone who was to be brought to justice. Did that serve international criminal justice the best way? I'll leave you to answer that question but when that first trial over Kosovo started added later where the indictments concerning Bosnia and Croatia they came in the November of 2001 four months after Molosevic had been arrested and two months before his trial was due to start for Kosovo. The trial chamber ruled that he should only be tried on Kosovo on one matter deal with this simply but what happened? Prosecution wanted a massive show trial of all three indictments together full of evidence that any criminal lawyer was able to say was not necessary to prove the charges and so the show trial that developed around Molosevic then had to be spun that somehow he was doing something wrong or we were doing something wrong by playing them at their own game and the number of articles I read in the New York Times, Washington Post and other respected journals, The Times I think they're here tonight at which reflected that kind of attitude actually were really recycling the propaganda and points of views of the institutions and the politicians who'd caused the trouble in the first place. One thing Molosevic and the prosecution agreed upon together the only thing was that they should have a joint trial. I got it wrong at first I applied for one trial and severance and he told me no joint trial so I had to backtrack on the filing that was submitted. So there we are that's a big name case where there's to be a show trial. Let's look at what happened yesterday special tribunal for Lebanon it's been in a building for five years in Holland kicking around lots of jobs lots of judges lots of expenses lots of investigators about a thousand people there one big courtroom all lovely jubbly everyone getting on nice payroll and there's no one there they haven't had anyone there their whole investigation was a complete failure and they had to redo it originally it was going to be against Syria we had all that for two or three years and then they discovered the evidence when they investigated for the third time targets that they wanted to bring cases against all very well and good if you've got the people there but these people aren't even there no one knows even if they're alive they could be dead but yesterday announced was that there was to be trials and absenture of four of those people is that a waste of money is that serving justice victims what's all that about and to put it as an announcement by the court they've been planning it for months they've been interviewing people for jobs they've been putting together defence teams so they've known what they're going to be doing it's not a question of suddenly the judges coming out of a white room where they've had nothing to do with anybody coming to an earth shattering conclusion that trials and absenture are the way forward for everybody not at all an entirely self-serving justification of an institution for which I can see no point at all allowing as international criminal justice has this crusade against impunity to be such a major force and something you're taught about in the halls of academia has become a very dangerous thing indeed I don't know how many of you are well versed in the laws of Bangladesh but if you go to their international crimes tribunals act of 2009 amending the 1973 act you'll find there the most revolting and utterly pernicious statute in the name of the war against impunity that you could ever hope to see uh this was a document actually originally drafted by my friend Otto Trifthra whose book many of you will have uh Otto drafted it in the max plank institute in 1972 with a colleague of of his and did a little nuremberg model which was all the rage at that time and off it went to Dakar and it was meant to prosecute people the pakistan prisoners of war and to be an instrument of truth and justice but there was a political deal and the pakistan prisoners of war went back and no one was prosecuted under this little act that Otto had drafted and 2009 change of government and we have the right wing anwari league coming in uh they don't like the islamic party jam at islami too much and they've decided to put the whole of the chief executive of the islamic party all on trial for war crimes that happened in 1971 um I showed Otto the statute at in saltsburg this summer when I was lecturing for him and it wasn't his statute that he drafted at all it was completely different and what had happened here was that all the national rights that anyone would have under bangladeshi law had been exported i taken out and imported international crimes tribunals act with international crimes genocide crimes against humanity etc but with no definitions and no defence rights at all jamat brought this problem to me last year in june and I looked at it was horrified and took another look at it but I noticed that very worthy international human rights groups were going around with paragraphs saying we support the battle against impunity bringing war criminals to justice etc etc but no one had read the bleeding act no one had looked at this thing no one had put their brains together to see what was going on here so the crusade against impunity and if you looked at the government's websites they were repeating all these paragraphs and saying what good boys they were signing up to the ICC proud members of the international club but they've got this stinking pernicious act back home where they put people on trial the first trial has started sciody and um detained people without charge for over a year and not allowed defence lawyers in for the interviews that the prosecutors have you've got to prove your alibi you've got to prove this absolutely pernicious so what's going on there the crusade against impunity has given a device to governments to subvert the truth crusade and justice and provide something that goes against justice one last area and it's the area i'm involved in at the moment that's the kenya case um i'm not going to say too much about it but that's hangs on the definition of crimes against humanity a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population in for in pursuant of a state or organisational policy what's of interest though is that the pre-trial chamber have suddenly brought out a new definition of organisational policy that's never been in the law before wasn't part of nuremberg wasn't part of anything before and made it something that a football supporters club could actually be put on trial at the ICC under crimes against humanity so all millwall fans watch out tomorrow behave yourselves because you're getting there you're getting there and Ocampo needs to get some credibility um so that can happen but what was remarkable to me was that judge called the german judge looked at this and said no state or organisational policy means what they said it ought to mean and what the founding fathers of the ICC said it was going to mean and that's something with state like qualities but prosecutor pre-trial chamber two of those judges have now this new definition somebody or whatever the the basic human values test we've called it in our filings nothing to do with organisational policy but there we are that's what happens that's what creeps why is that happening well because they don't like violence in elections in Africa so someone's got to be made an example of we've got a problem in Kenya let's let's put a trial on there and keep everybody quiet might be a good reason might be a bad reason but as I understand it it's not the law and it's not what justice is about if you have been listening thank you thank you very much Stephen okay Robert Murthur will now make a few comments uh for five minutes Robert and I will be short don't worry so yes hello everybody and um thank you very much for coming you know so as Stephen mentioned in his introduction so I'm largely the brain behind this event and um so we largely had to reorganise the panel you know as many of you learned on very short notice as well and so we had to reorganise our interventions as well and so I'm going to keep it very short and I just think I'm going to just tell you two little stories like the story since yesterday morning uh and the story since 15 months so the story since yesterday morning is that Mr Jacques Vajès wrote to me and said that he had caught a flu you know and they have temperatures in Paris so it was a little shock you know so what should I do so I had you know the you know possibility to call up Stephen who was very kind you know when he answered the phone to actually step in and his first reaction was hmm so you're in the shit aren't you so at last minute resort he actually helped me out to come in here but then a much larger problem emerged so I mean this event was largely set up as a trap for Jacques Vajès and I you know have only nice things to say to Stephen whereas you know I didn't have those nice things to say to Jacques Vajès and so the commentary you know on what the work of a defense consul really entails and when do you overstep the line and what are you are you know historical you know associations and who do you associate with is a very different story for Jacques Vajès than it is for many other defense consul nevertheless to point out for instance with Jacques Vajès one thing that would have been really far more clear in this room is his association with you know the 8th of May 1945 so the time when the Nazis were defeated and the massacre occurred in Satif Algeria and Jacques Vajès used this foundational moment to basically construct this entire career as a very radical attitude towards the state of France and towards everyone else so I'm looking forward to discuss that with Marty later on as well as we struck a little deal that we still will be representing certain opinions of Jacques Vajès tonight here in the discussion and yeah so it was 15 months ago that I contacted Marty to do this thing with Jacques Vajès and it had many many many facets to it and so yeah I'm gonna look forward to your questions from the floor after our discussion has kicked off on the issues raised of the two speakers thank you thank you good evening um I'm actually uh not not maybe happy that Jacques Vajès didn't make it but um but having worked on the other side of uh of Stephen I'm I'm quite excited to to engage with you um I'm honored to be sharing the stage with Marty Koskymemi who's uh who's textbooks I think uh every law student has and um whose legal mind has really shaped and continues to shape the field of international law and thank you all for being here today I'm uh I'm deeply humbled I'd like to start off also uh to telling you a little story um about the moment that I realized what the value really was of international criminal justice as Professor Hopkins mentioned I spent a year and a half working in the office of the prosecutor of the ICC and I started off really as a skeptic for a year I was part of the team that worked on the Kenya cases we started off with communications that victims had sent in NGO reports which I know Stephen takes issue with news stories but and as the allegations mounted we we started realizing what exactly had happened in Kenya over the span of three months in 2007 2008 um and the investigators eventually collected enough evidence that the violence had been organized and so we applied to the chamber for summons to appear for six individuals and those were the six individuals that we thought were the most responsible for the full range of crimes that had happened in Kenya during that period as some as you may know a couple weeks ago the the pre-child chamber confirmed the charges for four out of the six individuals so two of them are now free unless of course of course a prosecution can appeal that decision the other four will go on to trial um all six individuals were prominent public figures in Kenya but two in particular enjoyed almost a semi-divine status uhuru kenyata who is Stephen Kay's client um was the the son of the father of Kenya the scion of the founding dynasty and William Ruto was a prominent politician from the rift valley which is the agricultural engine of Kenya was without any irony on the evening news and in daily newspapers referred to as the king of the rift late last spring the six suspects came to the haig for their initial appearance the initial appearance is a procedural um formal rather dry event the judges asked read out the charges and they asked each suspect to confirm that they are indeed the person who has been summoned to the court the whole event lasted less than an hour but the effect i think lasted much longer because that was the day that those individuals that had spent up their entire careers building themselves up to be untouchable that was the day that they had to answer to a judge there was no more mystery uhuru kenyata and William Ruto that day onwards they were just regular people who were subordinate to the rule of law i was working in the analysis section and one of the things that we had to do was to monitor the public opinion of kenyans regarding the work that we were doing that day the support for the ic skyrocketed um the ic had done something that no court in kenya had been able to do and it proved that no one is above the law since then the court has accepted almost 500 victims applications so i respectfully disagree with uh steven k that the ic does not serve the interests of victims like those of you who are students here at soas uh i'm part of the same generation the generation that is we're just starting off our careers the generation that we won't just be building upon the former Yugoslavia and Nuremberg but we'll also be building upon Rwanda and what we've learned since Sierra Leone Congo Côte divoire Libia and we're faced with a drastically different world to us the idea and rhetoric of colonialist oppression we associated with the dictators that oppress their own people rather than the colonialism of a bygone era and to us international institutions like the international criminal court they are more than just an experiment they they are part of an enduring global social contract but we are also not blind and that is why we must quite genuinely and honestly ask ourselves the question of whether international criminal justice is it achievable and is it achievable through a permanent tribunal can we overcome the challenges of legitimacy of access and of wider acceptance of the court both by the victims communities and by the communities of of those individuals who we are charging or must we simply concede that the only two options that we have is either impunity or show trials and the question to us is of utmost importance because and I I hope I speak on behalf of others in this room we want to end up on the right side of history I look forward to discussing all of this with my eminent fellow panellists thank you thank you Polina okay we're going to have a few minutes of response first of all marty and then I'll give steven the opportunity to say a few more words and then um we've all been very patient and we'll take I'm sure there'll be lots of questions from the audience we'll take there so marty first every trial affirms and reaffirms a structure of power and preference in this world it does this whether anybody wants this or doesn't want it that is the way the nature of criminal trials I want to take on steven case point about our no longer being in newttenberg I completely disagree with him we are in newttenberg every single day legal technique has been building around international institutions such as the international criminal court the ad hoc criminal tribunals and of course universities and law schools especially in the developed north international criminal law has become a very technical thing spreading as a expert as a field of expert knowledge all over the place one effect that this turn to technique is is to make the audience watching these events believe that it's all about parking tickets after all that there are these respectable lawyers in their gowns putting forward technical points whom none of us of course really understand and whose relevance whose relevance to what has happened in the past say in northern Uganda seems very obscure indeed there is the famous are newy around or there was the famous are newy around the newttenberg trials the journalists left after a few months because who can take all this pleading and pleading and procedural points we all know that the un new is all over the place where international criminal law is being exercised today when Yugoslavia and populations are have been or where interviewed in the aftermath during the Milosevic trial and in the aftermath of the Milosevic trial as to well what do you think about what's going on in the Hague well what is going on in the Hague we what is the language they speak in the Hague who are these people and where is the Hague anyway there is a big structure of power knowledge expertise institutions out there slowly building itself up a few people are being indicted it's true it's true a few people mostly Africans of course what is the so I say every criminal trial affirms a structure of power in this world a hierarchy of knowledge and of value what is the structure of power a hierarchy of knowledge and value that this constantly expanding field of technical knowledge is affirming we can think about this I suggest to you in two ways we approach these problems when we think about the Ugandan or the about the indictment of al-Bashir about the Lord's liberation army about Gaddafi we can approach all of this from two different perspectives one perspective is this all the world is by and large fine we have some problems in the margins we deal with this we have institutions we have expertise we have men and women who devoted their careers they travel far and wide and then meet at congresses like this but by and large it's fine and let's go and have a drink that's what most of us most of the time think this way that affirms one way to think about the world one structure of power of knowledge and of expertise there's another way to think about the world many people think this that the world is a disaster that the world didn't just happen to become a disaster it's a disaster because of the practices that men and women exercise in this world because powerful men and women participate in powerful institutions the deprivation the misery and the injustice of this world is not approached even by the international criminal law system i'm afraid it enables us to look away from these things okay that's a great question thank you sure before Stephen K kicks off if we're still in Nuremberg today yeah how does the barbie case compared to Nuremberg wasn't an improvement or actually was getting worse in its standards what do you think yeah so the barbie case i think was a completely different case from Nuremberg in the barbie case at issue was the identity of France and there were three propositions put forward in the in in the case there was the proposition put forward by the organizations of la resistance that the France we know we want to remember and celebrate was the France of the heroes those who fought against the Nazis Jean Moulin there was another story that was being put forward that was the story of les enfants this year the children of the village of is here who had were taken away to Auschwitz on the last train this is the story of france as a country of miserable collaborators a country of victims a history of sadness and cruelty and then there was a third story which was the story of france in the 50s and 60s and the 8th of may the france of colonialism the france of the algerian war and everything that took place in the algerian war the barbie trial was a show trial there were three shows that were being put on and different people the different auditors looked at different parts of the show it has to be understood in the french context in the franco german context perhaps if certainly in the context of the holocaust and of human misery and heroism Nuremberg I think of in terms of the victors celebrating themselves if you want to if we want to go to detail I can continue on this but Nuremberg and to this extent here I was and to this extent was different from today that it was the story of the second world war not the third one thank you Marty Stephen do you want to make any other quick comments and then we'll take some questions the UN ad hoc tribunals and let's take the Yugoslavia tribunal which kicked international criminal justice off were set up under chapter 7 UN charter to maintain and enforce peace measures a lot of you here will know the Tardig jurisdiction judgment looking looking at that at the time as I had to wrestle with it and looking at those words and then looking for precedents had they ever done this before and not seeing any and taking that argument um it was quite clear that the cassasi appeals chamber um weren't ever going to listen to us and that this was a railroad that was going straight ahead and I remember in fact being in New York in uh 1993 when it was being discussed and I went to the New York annual bar conference and I was wondering where these powers came from how how they they could do it and there seemed a great deal of uncertainty in the air um but if you fix your court with your judges and cassasi god rest his soul was was a lovely guy a great humanitarian etc um you get the answer that you want and politically international criminal justice was really born from a base of very doubtful legal precedent but they wanted that the court was structured to ensure the result was delivered and you look at the people who were there at that time in the appeals chamber and as I've always said they weren't going to vote themselves out of a job like the Lebanon tribunal at the moment and so I think one has to realise that these events uh come into our lives they affect the lives of individuals they affect the life of Dusko Tarditch who was made the example the first example and he was really um a nobody um I think even he with his ego would admit that that he was a nobody uh a cafe owner in Kozorat and found himself there because that was what was wanted um so uh the the the resources out there that you have to face and confront as a defense counsel I often feel like donkey hote with sancho panza and I'm on a donkey and I've got a twig and I'm charging at the windmills because I think the fix is massive behind the scenes that we have to face and I'm afraid I saw that in the organisational policy reasoning of pretrial chamber two on the Kenya case because they stretched that definition in a way that no one had written about it before and even those people like Darryl Robinson are saying yeah this is what we want I mean the background and history ain't there but this is what we want but that's not their job to want to want it that way what right have they got to walk into people's lives countries say you're going to run your country this way but they don't know anything about Ahuru Kenyatta they don't know anything about Ruto and and what they do they don't know at all they want an example that's what it's about thank you student