 Thank you very much, Joe. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm absolutely delighted to be back in Glasgow and at the Royal Plesofidal Society, my first appearance in your 217 years. An amazingly impressive statistic. We are here today, each of us as individuals amongst a group that has come together. Ond os ydych chi'n gau'r cyfnod yma, oherwydd mynd i'r ddwych ar gweithio, ychydig, ychydig, ychydig, ymgynghwyddau sy'n i'r cyhoeddfeydd. Rwy'n gweithio i chi ddweudio ar y cyhoedd, am wneud i'r gweithio, eu bod yn gweithio'r cyhoedd yn gweithio'r gweithio. Not a blank slate, none of us are. In his very fine autobiography. If you want to leave the lights on a bit to help people, that's absolutely fine, I'm very relaxed with that. In his very fine autobiography, Interesting Times the renowned historian Eric Hobbsbawr recognised the complex connection between who we are and what we do. he noted what he called the profound way in which the interweaving of one person's life and times, and the observation of that life and times, help us to shape historical analysis. I'm not a historian, I'm a lawyer and I focus on matters international. Mae ymddiwch yn ymddiol iawn i'r byw i'r ddweud y gallu ymddiol i'r cyflwyno'r ffordd. Mae'r rhwng yn ei wneud yn ymddiol, mae'r rhai yn ymddiol a'r cyflwyno'r ffordd. Mae'r rhwng yn ymddiol i'r cyflwyno i'r ddyliau a'r ddechrau. Mae'r cyfrifiadau o'r cyfrifiadau a'r cyfrifiadau yn y ffordd y gallu cyfrifiadau. Y animals are one of my experience now over nearly 30 years of being an international lawyer. Not least in the courtroom. Appearing before international judges for many different backgrounds points to a clear conclusion. Individual lives and personal histories really matter and they really can make a difference. East West Street took nearly seven years to write. Ond yw'n gweld gwahodd o un rhan o'r ysgol, ond yn llwyddiadol, llwyddiadol o'r rhan o'r ysgol. Nid yw'n cyflwyno cymdeithasol o'r cyllid hynny, mae'r ddechrau yn gweld rhan o'r rhan o'r llwyddiadol, yn cyflwyno'r rhan o'r rhan o'r llwyddiadol, ac mae'r rhan o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r llwyddiadol, yn cael ei ddod y systemol yw Llywodraeth. mae'n gynnwys nghyddiol yn yr uneth o'r wych yn y tydd, mae'n bwysig, mae'n gwytaeth gerosllwyn amgylcheddol yn eu lleffyeth garfyn. Rydyn ni'n gyflei arfer y ffosti gwerthfeydd ac efallai'n gydweithio'r ddechrau dyma'r pari. Ydw mewn amser, mae'n clywed mewnence regionol i gwasanaeth, cwestiwys oedder, flyniad a'r un yma yn yma i ddweud'r gwestiynau, o'r 거ch iawn o'r identityni. Yn gyffredinol, chi be intens i chi dysgu, i chi'n cyffredinol nifer o'r gwyfyrd o'r gwyfyrdd o'r cyfrygiad? Yr cyffredinol o'r gwyffyrd o'r gwyffyrdd o'r gwyffyrdd o'r gwyffyrd o'r gwyffyrdd o'r gwyffyrdd o'r gwyffyrdd o'r gwyffyrdd o'r dwych yn yr unig? Mae'n gwneud bod yw pethau ymddangos ar hyn ar hyn o'r dweud, a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r dweud i chi'n mynd i ddodol a'r geneside i ddweud i chi yn 1945. Y Ddweud yw'r ysgrifennu wedi'u ymweld i'n mynd i'r hyn o'r gyflwybwyg. Mae'r hyn o'r gweithio'r 2010. I was immersed in my world, classrooms at university in London, academic articles, doing cases in the Hague. An invitation arrived from Ukraine, an email from law faculty in the university of a city that used to be called Lemberg during the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, then became Lviv, Poland until 1939, and then Lviv, Ukraine after 1945. Would I care to come and deliver a lecture perhaps not so different from this one tonight, on the work I do on crimes against humanity and genocide, about the cases I've been involved in, about the academic work I've done, and on the Nuremberg trial's impact on our modern world? Yes, I said, I'd be happy to do that. I'd long been fascinated by the Nuremberg trial, by the myths, by the words, by the images, by the sounds. The trial was totally catalytic. It was the moment when our modern system of international justice such as it is crystallised into being. I was mesmerised by the points of detail by the lengthy transcripts, the terrible evidence, the books, the memoirs, the diaries that described in forensic detail the testimony that was put before the judges, and the love affairs that went on behind the scenes. I was drawn to films, many of you will have seen, judgement at Nuremberg, which won an Oscar in 1961, memorable because of Spencer Tracy's momentary, unexpected flirtation with Marlene Dietrich, and one line from the closing scene when he gives his judgement. We stand for truth, justice and the value of a single human life. But there were also practical reasons for my interest in Nuremberg because of the trial's influence on my work. The Nuremberg judgement blew a big wind into the sails of the human rights movement. Sure, there was a whiff of victor's justice, but there was no doubting the catalytic significance of that moment. For the first time in human history, the leaders of a country were put on trial before an international court. That had never happened before. Probably my work as a barrister, rather than my writings that caused the invitation to be sent from Lviv. In the summer of 1998 I was involved in the drafting of the Statute of the International Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction over both genocide and crimes against humanity. The essential difference between these two concepts is on who is protected and why. Imagine 10,000 people being killed. A systematic killing of such a large number of individual human beings will always be a crime against humanity. But will it be a genocide? That depends on the intentions of the killers and the ability of prosecutors to prove that intention. To establish the crime of genocide, you have to prove that the act of killing is motivated by a special and different intent. Namely, the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. If a criminal prosecutor cannot prove the existence of that intent, it will not be a genocide in law. That's why you have the two concepts operating side by side. Every crime against humanity, every genocide will also always be a crime against humanity, but not every crime against humanity will be a genocide. A few months after the ICC was created, some of you will remember Senator Pinochet of Chile was arrested in London on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The House of Lords ruled that even as a former president of Chile, he was not entitled to claim immunity from the English courts. That was a novel and revolutionary decision. In the years that followed, the gates of international justice slowly began to creak open. After five decades of relative quiet, cases from the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda soon landed on my desk. Others followed, Congo, Libya, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Guantanamo, Iraq. It's a long and terrible list. All of the cases were based on the rules that were created in 1945. The long and sad list of cases of course also reflected the failure of good intentions. I became involved in several cases, too many cases, that involve mass killing. I have seen a great number of mass graves. Some of the cases raised claims of crimes against humanity, others concerned genocide. Crimes against humanity is about the protection of individuals. Genocide is about the protection of groups. The two distinct crimes grew side by side, but over time genocide has tended to emerge as the crime of crimes. A hierarchy that leaves the unfortunate suggestion that killing of very large numbers of human beings as individuals is somehow less terrible. Occasionally I'd pick up hints about the origins and purposes of the two terms and connection to arguments first made in courtroom 600. Yet I never did inquire too deeply as to exactly what had happened at Nuremberg. I knew generally how these crimes had come into being and how they subsequently developed, but I didn't know the personal human stories behind them or how they were argued at Nuremberg. The invitation from Leviv offered an opportunity to learn more. I could say that I made the trip to give a lecture, but that would not be true. I gave the lecture because of this fellow, my grandfather aged 10. He was born in the city of Leviv in 1904. His name was Leon Boholtz. He called the city Lemberg when he spoke in German, Levoeuf if he spoke in Polish. In his wonderful slim volume, Moid Levoeuf, Maid Leviv, the Polish poet Joseph Wittlin, in a book recently translated for the first time in English, City of Lyons, describes the essence of being a Levivian. An extraordinary mixture he writes of nobility and roguery, of wisdom and imbecility, of poetry and vulgarity, but he continues. Nostalgia falsifies our flavours and our memories, and it tells us to taste nothing but the sweetness of the city of Levoeuf today, whereas, he continues, I know people for whom Levoeuf was a cup of gall. It was a cup of gall for my grandfather, a cup of gall buried deep, part of a hidden hinterland of which he never ever spoke to me or my brother. His silence was about the wounds of a family that he left behind in 1914 when he moved to Vienna when the city was invaded by the Russian army, and then lost forever after 1939. But the moment I first set foot in the city in the autumn of 2010, it felt incredibly familiar, like a sort of long lost relative, as though the city was part of my DNA. I had missed it and I felt comfortable there. Why I had that reaction to being in a place caused me to explore psychoanalytical writings that address the relationship not between parent and child, but between grandparent and grandchild, and I was directed by a French psychoanalyst to the work of two Hungarian psychoanalysts, Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham. What haunts they wrote are the gaps left within us by the secrets of others, and those are the words with which East West Street opens. My grandfather Leon's secret was that he came from a huge family centred in Lemberg and a small nearby town. Dozens of uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces and more distant relatives. The family grew and grew until 1939 when war came to the city. By the spring of 1945, he was the only member of that family who was still alive. In 1939 he was living in Vienna. He was expelled from Vienna because he was stateless and because he was Jewish. He went to Paris and I always knew him and thought of him as a Frenchman, but it was only now in 2010 that my mother for the first time gave me access to his private papers. Amongst the private papers I found this document and it explains why on a day like today when we have a Home Secretary determining that a young woman who only has one nationality, British nationality shall henceforth be made stateless so that she cannot come back into this country. This document says that the Jew, Boholtz Morris Leon, is required to leave the territory of the German Reich by December 25, 1938. Why could he be expelled? He could be expelled because he had been made stateless. That is one of the reasons why in the years after the war the British government led the world in adopting a new international convention adopted in 1961 on the reduction of statelessness. Article 8 of which says without ambiguity it is contrary to international law in every circumstance to make a human being stateless. That is what our Home Secretary did today, the first time it has happened. It is a big day today to talk about these subjects. That is not without skirting over the complexities of this particular case, the terrible statements that seem to be made by this young woman and the complexities of understanding. They raise many complex issues that are not simple but one thing is simple and black and white. It is contrary to international law in all circumstances to make a human being stateless. That is how things begin and that is why today is a dark, dark day in the history of our country. I had always assumed that my grandfather Leon had then left Vienna as he did in January 1939 with his wife Rita, my grandmother and his one-year-old daughter, their one-year-old daughter, my mother Ruth. But in the course of the research writing the book I learned that this was not the case and I think actually it was this central fact that lay deep and which touched a big secret in our family history. My grandfather went from Vienna to Paris by himself and only now gaining access to these papers did I learn that his daughter, who later became my mother, travelled to Paris a few months later and that his wife spent another three years living in Vienna. I got the sense that something else had intervened in their lives. Why did Leon leave Vienna by himself? How on earth did my mother get from Vienna to Paris aged one by herself? And why did my grandmother stay in Vienna and allow herself to be separated from her only child and infant? These were big questions and they hung in the air as such questions do. I returned to the documents that I'd found in Leon's papers. There's a litigator which is a sort of lesser amateur historian-come-psychiatrist. You learn that every scrap of paper, every photograph is capable of hiding information, information that isn't immediately knowable. I call it the muck of evidence and I love it. I've learnt from my courtroom practice and there may be other lawyers here in the room. You've got to look very carefully at everything. You keep an open mind. You attend to the unexpected. You find the dots, you try to join them and you persist because nothing is ever only what it seems. Two items stood out. The first was a tiny scrap of paper, yellow. Folded in half. One side was blank. The other side bore a name and an address written firmly in pencil. Miss E. M. Tilney, Manuka, Bluebell Road, Norwich, Angleterre. The second item was a photograph, small, black and white, taken in 1949. Middle-aged man staring intently into the camera with a faint smile across his lips. On the back of the photograph in blue ink was written Herzliche Grüße aus Wien September 1949. Warmest wishes from Vienna with an indecipherable signature. I asked my mother what the piece of paper was and who the person was and she said I didn't know her and I didn't believe her. I parked these pieces of paper and decided I'd come back to them later. I've taken you on a little personal detour. Let's get back to the lecture that I was to give in Leviv and two coincidences. The first was that I discovered that the man who invented the concept of crimes against humanity and put it into international law in the summer of 1945 amazingly came from Leviv and even more amazingly studied at the very law school that had invited me to give the lecture and no one there was aware of that fact. How amazing I thought, I'll turn up and share with them this remarkable discovery. His name was Hirsch Lauterpat. He was born in the small town of Zsulkyf about 15 miles north of Leviv. He moved to the university and studied there from 1915 to 1919 then moved to Vienna and then went to London to do another doctorate at the London School of Economics. In 1937 he became professor of international law at Cambridge University. In 1945 he published the book that laid the foundations for the modern system of human rights. He called it an international bill of the rights of man and it was totally revolutionary. His idea was that every human being every one of us in this room would have rights under international law because we were human beings. Not only domestic law under international law and until that moment that did not exist. In April 1945 after the war in Europe came to an end Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed there would be a criminal trial for senior Nazi leaders and the British hired Lauterpat to assist in the prosecution. In July 1945 the chief US prosecutor Robert Jackson US Supreme Court judge travelled to London to draft the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal. The four powers, the Allies America, Britain, France, the Soviet Union couldn't agree about the list of crimes to put into the jurisdiction of the tribunal. And so Jackson turned to Lauterpat for help. On July the 29th Jackson left his room at the Claridge's Hotel in Mayfair and was driven up to Cambridge to have lunch with the Lauterpacks. Here you see Hirsch Lauterpat sitting in his garden in Cranmer Road, Cambridge. The two men discussed the problem of the list of crimes. Lauterpacks thought it might be a good idea to insert titles. Jackson reacted positively so Lauterpat tended another idea. In respect of atrocities committed against civilians a matter on which the Americans and the Soviets were very deeply divided. Lauterpat had both an academic interest in this subject and a deeply personal interest. There was his family in Lviv and at this point, July 1945 he had no idea what had happened to them. Why not, he said, why not refer to atrocities committed against individual human beings civilians as crimes against humanity? There you see the words in Lauterpacks own hand. The term would cover atrocities committed against individuals on a massive scale and introduce a new concept into international law. It had never been used before. That's a legal term. Jackson liked the idea, took it back to London, persuaded the three other countries to accept it and it was duly incorporated into article 6 paragraph C of the Nuremberg statute. Crimes against humanity signifies, Lauterpacks said, that individuals who break international law cannot hide behind the sovereignty of their states. Preparing the lecture, of course, also required me to focus on the concept of genocide which brings me to the second surprise or coincidence. The man who invented that word in November 1944 also came from the Viv and he also studied at the same law school as Lauterpacks, the law faculty that had invited me and amazingly again those who invited me were unaware of that fact. They didn't overlap completely. Lauterpacks was there from 1915 to 1919, Lenkin was there from 1921 to 1926. He got a doctorate, he became a public prosecutor in Warsaw. In 1933 he started turning to new international crimes to address barbarity and vandalism against human beings. Unlike Lauterpacks, his focus was not on the protection of individuals but on the protection of groups. The timing was terrible, Hitler had just come to power in 1933 so the idea did not take off. In 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Lenkin was in Warsaw working as a public prosecutor. He escaped, made his way to Sweden by his parents' hometown under Soviet control and then in 1941 went from Sweden to America. He travelled the long route. Russia, Japan, Seattle and then in Durham, North Carolina went up as an academic refugee. He travelled with no money and no personal belongings but a vast quantity of luggage. That was because during his months in Stockholm he had collected from across Europe decrees promulgated by the Nazis in every country they had occupied. In America when he arrived he analysed the decrees, offered a contract to write a book that described an underlying master plan of Nazi intent. The book was published in November 1944 with the title Axis Rule of Occupied Europe. He gave to Chapter 9 of the book a title with an entirely new word, one he had invented. Geneside. The crime of the destruction of groups here you see it in his own hand. An amalgam of the Greek word genos meaning tribe or race and the Latin word sidae meaning killing. In the summer of 1945 Lemkin was hired by the US government to work on war crimes and he started to work with Robert Jackson but totally separately from Lauterpan. He pushed his idea of genocide a crime for which he wanted the senior Nazis to be indicted. He focused on the destruction of groups, Poles, Jews and Roma. He was deeply disappointed when the statute did not include the crime of genocide. He took himself to London, he was persistent in the drafting of the specific indictment against the 22 defendants. He succeeded in getting the crime of genocide included as a war crime. There was tremendous opposition so it was a matter of great surprise that he succeeded. Robert Jackson's office was opposed under pressure from southern senators concerned about discrimination by African Americans and the British objected on the grounds that it would be used by those who were subject to British colonialismism. But against the odds he succeeded and he was greatly pleased to have succeeded. On October 18, 1945 the term was included in the indictment. The Nuremberg trial opened on November 20, 1945. Lauterpacht was present in the courtroom in Nuremberg at the Palace of Justice working with the British team pushing for the protection of individuals. But Lemkin stayed in Washington with the American team back home pushing for the protection of groups. One of the 22 men in the dock was this man who became the fourth man in my story. His name is Hans Frank. He was a lawyer. He'd been to some of the best law schools in Germany and from 1928 he served as Adolf Hitler's personal lawyer. He became Minister of Justice in Bavaria in 1933 and in October 1939 when the war began he became Governor-General of Nazi-occupied Poland. In August 1942 he visited Lemberg and the District of Galicia which had become part of his government general. He hosted a concert with a little-known conductor Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and gave a series of speeches in which he announced by coincidence in the very room in which I would lecture 75 years later the elimination of the city's entire population of Jewish people hundreds of thousands of people. Among the people caught up in the horrors of the following days and weeks and months following Frank's visit were the families and friends and university teachers of Lauterpacht and Lemkin as well as my grandfather's own family. For each family there would be only a single survivor. Frank did not seem to be unduly perturbed by these actions but was bothered more by the mundanities of daily life. I discovered, for example, that he lodged at the home of his deputy Otto von Wester, Governor of Galicia those of you who've heard my BBC podcast series The Rock Line will know that he is the central character as he is of the sequel to East West Street which will be published next year. Wester's son shared with me his mother's diary. Frau Charlotte von Wester wrote about that day when the mayhem was announced. She played chess with the girl from the journal I won twice, she wrote. After that, Frank went to bed very angry that he came back and drove away immediately. Just three years later Hans Frank was caught by the US Army near his home in Munich, Bavaria. With him were his diaries 42 volumes at a fantastic collection of artwork and when I say fantastic I mean fantastic it included this painting which some of you may have seen either at the National Gallery in London or in Poland Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Cecilia Gallarani the lady with an ermine. The painting hung in Hans Frank's private office for five years in the Varvel Castle in Cracow. It's now back there and you can see it. I visited it with Frank's son Nicholas who I've come to know and while we were standing in front of it he told me a story his father each morning would make him stand before the painting and slick down his hair like Cecilia Gallarani and the little boy was frightened of the painting because he thought the animal was a rat. He didn't know it was an ermine. Frank was in the dock now accused charged for crimes against humanity and genocide. On the first day of the trial the prosecutors went straight to what had happened in Lviv. 130,000 people killed in just a few weeks including 8,000 children right in the heart of the city. As those words were spoken in court on the first day of the trial Lauterpacht who was present and Lemkin who would have read them in Washington did not know whether those people included their own families. Remarkably at that moment in the trial they did not know that the man they were prosecuting was responsible for the killings of their entire families. But on this day for the first time ever the terms genocide and crimes against humanity were used in open court. I knew Lauterpacht and Frank were there together in the same room and I wondered if a photograph existed. Lauterpacht's son, Ellie who I knew told me there was no photograph but rather like my mother I didn't believe him and I persisted. A friend introduced me to the largest archive of photographs taken in Nuremberg on the first day and I spent a whole day going through hundreds of glass plate images each which had to be taken out of its little protective sleeve. Finally after many many hours I found what I was looking for. In the top left hand corner if you look very carefully I can highlight it you will see Hersch Lauterpacht sitting at the British prosecution table elbows on the table hands clenched under the chin attentive standing behind a Soviet prosecutor and then if you move to the lower right hand corner of the photograph you might spot the familiar image of Herman Göring in a white type of suit and then six to the left of Göring in the corner the semi-bowed head of Hans Frank and this photograph touched me very much divided by no more than a few tables and chairs Lauterpacht and Frank together in the same room the trial lasted a full year and judgement was handed down over two days on September the 30th and October the 1st 1946 we don't have time to get into the details of what happened in that remarkable year and the interrelationship between the three men but what did happen was described by the wonderful historian Anthony Beaver as being of a kind that no novel could possibly match the point that I made is that these three personal journeys coincided in ways that produced an outcome that changed the course of legal history and then history itself the ideas and endeavours of Lauterpacht and Lenkin influenced politics, history culture, my life and each of your lives the concepts have entered our world although most people are under the impression that crimes against humanity and genocide have existed as terms since time immemorial they have not they are invented products invented by two creative minds men driven by their own experiences forged on the anvil of a single city quite why Lauterpacht opted for the protection of the individual and Lenkin embraced the protection of the group is a matter of speculation their backgrounds were similar they studied at the same university they had the same teachers indeed if you want to trace the origins of these two ideas you can trace them to Lenberg to the events at the end of the war and to the law faculty of the university you can even trace the origins as I have to a single teacher the two men had in common Professor Julius Makarewicz the most famous of Poland's professors of criminal law you can even follow the line to a particular building and to a single classroom which as you can see is still a working classroom today but it has long changed from how it was in the period between 1915 and 1926 there's something else about the story that strikes me remarkable despite their common origins interests and journeys that I'm able at times to locate them in the same city on the same day although never in Nuremberg and never in courtroom 600 where they kept missing each other sometimes by just a few hours it seems that Lauterpacht in Lemkin never actually met but the concepts they put into international law inform my everyday working life and I frequently wondered how it could be that I ended up doing the work that I do my quest to understand Lauterpacht in Lemkin was surely driven in some way by my own family history by stories that had been buried away in crypts no doubt for the best of protective reasons during that quest I conducted a bit more family detective work I did manage to discover who Ms Tilney was and what she did and to understand why my mother and my brother and I have reasoned to be deeply grateful to a remarkable and courageous human being she was a missionary who worked for a place called the Surrey Chapel in Norwich which still exists today and which I have come to know very well she was born into that community motivated by the sermons of her father a pastor and by another pastor, David Panton she saved my mother's life and the lives of many other people because of a particular interpretation of chapter 10 verse 1 of Paul's letter to the Romans it seems that I exist and stand before you today simply because of her reading of a single line which caused her to travel to Vienna and save the life of a one year old child my mum I also uncovered the identity of a man in the bowtie that was a much more time consuming or even more time consuming exercise it took me east and then west across rivers across an ocean through hundreds of old Austrian telephone directories hiring a private detective in Vienna and then finally cracking the code with Facebook I kid you not I'm ashamed to admit it and I end up in a place called Massapequa Long Island in New York State with a lady who finds this photograph in her attic this photograph will open the door to unlocking another family mystery it is an image taken in a garden in Vienna probably number 4 Brahmsplatz in the spring of 1941 the lady in the middle is my grandmother and she stands with two men in white socks one of them, the one on the right as you look at the photograph was the man in the bowtie and he was her lover he wears white socks which I discovered are a mark of sympathy to the Nazis but actually he was a secret and hidden Jew who survived during the war in Vienna the discovery of his existence catalyzed another the identity of the person who was probably my grandfather's truest love his best friend Max there is also here a moral of a story if any of us are going to have an affair do not exclude the possibility that one of our grandchildren 75 years later will be able to discover with absolute precision what happened these efforts take time and patience and I was helped by a remarkable group of individuals you could call them an exercise in personal archaeological enterprise perhaps even more remarkably and unexpectedly I learned of the more direct connections between my family and the Lauterpacks and the Lemkin I was surprised very surprised to learn that my great-grandmother my grandfather's mother Amalia Buchholz was born in the same small town as Hirsch-Lauterpacks Giorgio not only that they were both born on the very same street a few hundred yards apart from each other it was called Lemberg-Astrasa back then and coincidentally or perhaps not the reason this is significant for me is that Hirsch-Lauterpacks only child his son Ellie happens to have been my first teacher of international law in 1982 I know you could not you simply could not invent it I worked with Ellie for 33 years as my mentor my friend and my colleague when we discovered, I discovered this point of connection the great writer Joseph Roth referred to this street as East West Street hence the title of the book but I went further and learned that Amalia Buchholz flashner born in Giorgio in the town of the Lauterpacks ended her life in the proximity of the Lempkins in September 1942 in the Kingdom of Hans Frank the last street Amalia Buchholz walked down was called Himmelfatstrasa the street to heaven it was the street that led from a railway platform to a gas chamber at a camp called Treblink one month after Amalia walked into that gas chamber Lempkins parents Bella and Joseph walked into exactly the same gas chamber Amalia's life was bookended between the Lauterpacks and Lempkins as it might be said is mine albeit in a very different way how do we begin to understand these points of connection and to possible coincidence two remarkable human beings who created ideas that have an enduring relevance today the relationship between the individual and the group has been significant across the ages Lauterpacks believed that we should concentrate on the protection of the individual and I think he would continue to argue today that Lempkins' invention of the concept of genocide has been practically useless and politically dangerous that it will tend to replace the tyranny of the state with the tyranny of the group and my own practical experience in courts around the world accords with that view I've seen for myself how by the focus on the protection of one group against another there is a tendency to reinforce the sense of them and us to amplify the power of group identity and association which is both a source of sustenance and danger how does this happen it happens because going back to the beginning of the lecture to prove a genocide you have to establish the existence and expression of an intention to destroy a group in whole or in part and I've seen for myself how that process tends to reinforce both a sense of victimhood of the targeted group and hatred towards the perpetrators as a group but of course I also understand what Lempkin was trying to do and he was surely right to recognise the reality that in most if not all cases mass atrocity is targeted against individuals not because of what they happen to have done as individuals but because they are a member of a group that is hated at a particular moment in time in place and Lempkin would say and it is a powerful argument that the law must reflect that reality that it must recognise and give legitimacy to feelings which we all have of association with one or more groups I am concerned about the hierarchy that seems to have emerged one that puts genocide atop the list of horrors so that a mere crime against humanity or war crime is somehow seen as a lesser evil if a president calls something a genocide it will be on page one of our newspapers if it is called a crime against humanity if it makes it into the papers at all it will be on page 13 that is the power of the word and of the idea created by Raphael Lempkin under our own association with group identity what is the enduring legacy by way of conclusion of these two legal terms the crime of genocide and the idea that each of us as individuals has rights under international law were invented in 1945 but the killings have not stopped today again there is a poison of xenophobia and nationalism coursing its way through the veins of Europe and many other parts of the world the strong man the strong leader there always men is back I see it on the journeys of Europe across our European continent I've seen it in Hungary in Ukraine those of you who've seen my film my Nazi legacy will have observed me standing in a far away field watching people dressed in SS uniforms celebrating the creation of Otto Wester's Waffen SS Galicia division I saw it too in the making of the BBC series travelling across Europe in Austria, Poland and many other places it's very hard to avoid what seems to be stirring and wondering where all of this is going to lead the generation that actually experienced the horrors of the 1930s that lived through the second world war that knows exactly and personally why states came together in 1945 to create a united nation and to adopt a universal declaration on human rights and a convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide that generation will soon no longer be with us and perhaps the disappearance of actual memory of actual experience allows our politicians to take for granted what occurred in 1945 it's impossible for me not to have gone through the experience of writing East West Street and the projects that are followed a total immersion in the world of the years between 1914 and 1945 and not feel an acute sense of anxiety as to what is stirring two years ago the man who's now the president of the United States of America a total and complete shutdown for Muslims entering the United States the idea that you would target people not because of what they've done not because of their individual propensities but because they happen to be a member of a particular group has a long and dark history the writer Primo Levi who spent a year at Auschwitz put the point more crisply than any in the preface to his book If This is a Man which was published in 1947 as he wrote many people many nations can find themselves holding more or less wittingly that every stranger is an enemy when this happens he continues when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism then at the end of the chain there is the concentration cap one thing leads to another against this background the idea of a travel ban based on a person's nationality or religion is deeply troubling experience teaches us to know where such a beginning can end singling out people not for what they have done but because they happen to be a member of a particular group one thing leads to another closer to home also we can smell a change in the air in this country the move to identity politics two years ago the prime minister of the united kingdom told her party conference if you believe that you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere she has made it clear that if she could she would take the united kingdom out of the european convention on human rights the country that created that convention her words reminded me of a passage in a book by stefan sphag which is the must read for our world today published in 1942 posthumously after he committed suicide it's got the title the world of yesterday for almost half a century he wrote I trained my heart to beat as the heart of a citizen of the world on the day I lost my Austrian passport I discovered that when you lose your native land you are losing more than a patch of territory which is set within borders one thing leads to another do we see shades of Germany in the 1930s when a rightly read British newspaper The Daily Mail and two others The Express and the Telegraph run front page stories with a picture of three senior judges each of whom I happen to know charged simply with the task of interpreting and applying English law and the constitutional requirements of article 50 of the Treaty on European Union and describing them under the banner headline enemies of the people what has become of us one former London Mayor offensively evokes Adolf Hitler as a supporter of Zionism another who went on shockingly to be our foreign secretary suggested that the European Union and Adolf Hitler somehow shared common aims Brexit and Trump are surely a reflection of this new direction and this direction is the context in which I oscillate between the views of Lauterpacht and Lemkin between the individual and the group between the realism of Lemkin and the idealism of Lauterpacht I can see the force of both their arguments and I recognise the tension and the struggle between the individual and the group between crimes against humanity and genocide it's a struggle that will not soon be resolved international law today embraces both at this particularly dangerous moment this then is the context in which I ended East West Street standing at a long ago place of mass killing caught between my head and my heart between my intellect and my instinct recognising the need to value the inherent worth of every human being yet also understanding that pull of tribal loyalty the essential truth of the notion that each of us is indeed haunted by the gaps left within us by the secrets of others but also by the possibility that the discovery of that haunting will not necessarily destroy us but could actually make us stronger thank you