 everyone, it's our great pleasure to welcome you to the next webinar of the Wire Crimes Research Group series of the World Studies Department. Today, we're particularly happy and very excited to host Professor Leila Sadat, who is going to talk about the draft articles, the draft Convention on the Crimes Against Humanity. When I was thinking about this webinar, I couldn't think anyone else to come and talk about that. And I will explain why is that. So Professor Leila Sadat is the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law. She has also served as a longtime director of the Whitney Harris War Law Institute of the Washington University School of Law. And she has been a special advisor of crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court Prosecutor since 2012, although she hasn't seen the court during the last months, as she will tell us. Professor Sadat is truly one of the most well-known professors and an authority in the field of public international law, international criminal law, human rights law, and foreign affairs with one of the most proliferated writers, academics, more than 100 books and articles. She has co-authored many leading textbooks in international criminal law and international law. Among them, there is this edited volume of the Cambridge University Press since 2011, forging a convention from crimes against humanity. And she has also created a film about this initiative. And when I told you before that I couldn't think of anyone else to talk us about the draft convention of the Crime Against Humanities, because Professor Sadat is the director of the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, a groundbreaking project which was launched in 2008 to write the world's first global treaty on crimes against humanity. And actually this effort that bore fruit at the International Law Commission and produced its own draft articles that are now pending before the Sixth Committee of the UN General Assembly. What else can I say? For Layla, that is also the president of the International Law Association of the American Brands, is a counselor of the American Society of International Law, a member of the US Council for Foreign Relations of the American Law Institute. She has clared both before American and French courts. And Layla, we are really excited and truly happy to have you with us this afternoon. And once more, thank you very much. And you have the floor. Thank you. Thank you so much, Maria. Thank you to everybody that's on Zoom, ready to listen to another Zoom lecture. I hope all of you are well. In spite of the pandemic, we finally have a little light at the end of the tunnel in our country with vaccines that are starting to roll out and a little bit nicer weather. It's not quite spring here. My virtual background is spring on my university campus. But in about a month, it will look like this. And it's lovely to be with you and think about renewal and hope and optimism rather than the very long, dark winter that I know that we've all been experiencing and especially in Europe and elsewhere. So thank you for having me here to talk about a subject that I'm very, very excited about, which is the Convention on Crimes Against Humanity. I am hopeful that the Zoom gods will comply and my PowerPoint will be shared with no problem. And I do have a very short snippet of a film that I'm going to show at the beginning. There, Maria, did that work? Yes, okay. So I teach, of course, on Zoom a lot, but they update it all the time, which means that you, just when you think you know, you don't really know. So anyway, this is our logo. You can see it's an individual sort of, any race, color, gender behind barbed wire with a dove and then a sword being beaten into a text. So beating swords into plowshares kind of idea. So I'm going to hopefully be able to share this little film, which will kind of give you a feel for what we'll talk about and then we'll go dive into some of the technical issues. And I'm really hoping the Vimeo works. I think it is going to close a lot of this other stuff. At the end of World War II, in a courtroom in Nuremberg, Nazi officers were convicted of crimes against humanity. The horror, I cannot describe to you. But 70 years after those trials, there is still no global treaty for the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity. What that means, is that the words uttered after Nuremberg never again have but a hollow significance. Crimes against humanity, as the term suggests, are some of the worst international crimes. They are widespread and systematic attacks perpetrated against the civilian population and they occur far too often, in particular, in the context of domestic political turmoil and conflict. The victims are always the most vulnerable civilians, women and children. And the perpetrators are almost always those who have as main mandate to just protect those who are not the victims of the world. They are the victims of the world. They are the victims of the world. Those who have as main mandate to just protect those vulnerable populations, they are doing the opposite. What is really missing in the arsenal of legal instruments is a specific treaty, a specific convention in relation to crimes against humanity. I have always said to people that as long as they are willing to be tortured, they are missing something. Everything we have experienced, there is only that justice that should be given to us. What we still don't have is a proper treaty that governs the obligations of states between themselves when confronted with perpetrators of crimes against humanity. A treaty that promotes awareness and accountability for crimes against humanity at the national level and encourages interstate cooperation on addressing these crimes. That is a positive development in my view. We are very hopeful that its time will soon come to have for the first time in history a convention on crimes against humanity. The process that has been really to date conducted by university people, by academics, by activists and specialists, but in a non-official setting. And now we are moving it into the official realm, the International Law Commission of the United Nations. Initiatives of this character, the crimes against humanity convention do not occur out of thin air. That it is because of the strength and perseverance and courage of individuals. This is how this gets done. For the first time in history, states and the international community are seriously considering the adoption of a new global convention on crimes against humanity. The world is ready, waiting, watching. What has happened to me, I hope to God that you never see it. We get a sense from the film that their victims all over the world, whether they have been the object of state aggression of some kind or they have been victimized by non-state actors. They are suffering from these crimes that of course were named at Nuremberg for the very first time. And I don't need to explain to this audience really how that happened, but if you will allow me to do so, here we are in 2021. So we're more than 75 years now after Nuremberg. We've been doing this project since 2008. So I realized my film is going to have to be redone at some point if this drags on much longer. And you can see I think from the film how widespread and systematic in fact these crimes are. So I'm going to go back to sharing my screen. Remember the Nuremberg Charter is article 6C. I can quote it to you by heart probably, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during the war or persecutions on political, racial or religious of grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the tribunal. And this was the important phrase at the end, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated, crimes against humanity, even though not as important to some of the prosecuting powers at Nuremberg because they wanted to focus on the aggressive war charges, none the less might have been one of the most revolutionary aspect of that trial, arguing that international law and the criminalization of activity as well as international human rights law could reach deep into a state and actually provide protection or impose obligations on individuals living in that state. And so it's unsurprising perhaps that we only got after the war, very piecemeal codification. We got the 1948 genocide convention, which as we know kind of criminalizes a piece of article 16, namely the persecution charges essentially, we later got the apartheid and the torture convention more recently the enforced disappearances convention, but lots of crimes are still not covered by these treaties. So in 2008 thinking about this, we started thinking about and even before then the district of Bessuni had been writing about this since 1994. We have a serious legal gap because we have criminality, mass atrocities on the scale of Cambodia's killing fields with 1.7 to 2 1.5 million killed out of a total population of seven million people in the country. And if we have to be honest with ourselves, it's very difficult to use the legal term genocide for that because there was so much of it was an attack based on political and social affiliation. These are crimes against humanity, but there was no treaty to cover that. Likewise, more recently in Bosnia versus Serbia when the International Court of Justice was asked to rule, the only hook to get the parties into court was in fact article nine of the genocide convention because it was a compromising clause that allowed the court to hear cases arising out of the interpretation of the genocide convention. But the court looking at the Yugoslavia tribunals jurisprudence said, well, we find genocide in Srebrenica, we don't really find it anywhere else. And anyway, although Serbia had an obligation to prevent, we can't find that they're complicit in the genocide itself. And so while it was an important and deeply significant judgment, it was unsatisfactory, right? Because so much of the atrocity crime, the signature crime of ethnic cleansing really of that war could not fall within the jurisdiction of the ICJ. If you think about the impunity gap, I showed you a little bit of the testimonial of the victims, whether they're North Koreans in detention camps, women being raped in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, individuals being exterminated by ISIS or otherwise tortured. You have huge, huge levels of criminality that in spite of the gains that we have made, and it is important to note that we have made progress, but you still have extensive campaigns of murder extermination, of sexual violence, of enforced disappearances, and of course, forced displacement deportation. And that is playing out. Even think about the case now brought by the Gambia versus Myanmar, where the allegation again is genocide. We have article nine of the genocide convention, but very reputable scholars on the other side are saying, well, can we really use genocide? Or is it quote, only as horrible as that is air quotes, crimes against humanity? And so I think this is not a problem that is going away anytime soon. At the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the special panel for East Timor, Sierra Leone, extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia. I did a study that was published in 2013 that shows how significant crimes against humanity charges really were at all of these courts and tribunals. And at the ICC, even more significantly, you get cases that are 100% crimes against humanity cases. Why? Because crimes against humanity can take place in peacetime. There are very, very few charges of genocide. There's the Al-Bashir case where genocide has been charged, but overall looking at the track records of all the international criminal courts and tribunals, genocide is fewer than 1% of all the cases brought, because it's just completely insignificant as an effective means of prosecution, with the exception of the Rwanda Tribunal where the genocide counts actually were able to be successful. At the ICC, though, crimes against humanity is going to be the core crime that's used. And it is often also used to accompany war crimes charges to get at specific kinds of criminality that the laws of wars don't really get at. So often you see the two in parallel, crimes against humanity charges brought that are essentially tracking, but also differentiating from the war crimes counts and crimes against humanity cases where no war crimes have been alleged or genocide counts, because it doesn't amount to genocide, and there's no armed conflict. If you think about prevention, this is something I call the atrocity cascade. Often you get situations in which a state is human rights violative, right? I'm not sure that's grammatically correct, but think of Syria before March 20, 2011, right? Human rights violations, but things that could be dealt with at the level of the human rights bodies, advocacy, and all of a sudden it starts to slip into demonstrations often against the government. And then governments sort of have this pivot point where it becomes a state policy to actually attack the protesters, and if it gets bad enough, the protesters arm and attack back, and you're into civil war. And so this kind of atrocity cascade is very much something that you see in the Syrian conflict where a sort of instable human rights disfavoring government slips into these kind of systemic crimes, which then can devolve into full fledged armed conflict with pockets of genocide on the territory, because minority groups then will become particularly susceptible. And the Syria conflict, as we know, has been outside the jurisdiction of the ICC for reasons that this audience knows all too well, and so it is essentially hanging out there with very little accountability except what we're seeing at the triple IM. So the idea behind our initiative was that we could complete the Rome statute system by adding to the vertical system of criminal enforcement in the Rome statute a horizontal system that would allow for interstate cooperation just as we have for torture, and we have for in the Geneva Conventions and we have for enforced disappearance and we have for terrorism, right? We have, what, 13 or 17 if we count some of the regional instruments on terrorism, but not a single treaty on crimes against humanity. In fact, we have over 325 international criminal law instruments in the world that criminalize everything from submarine cable cutting to genocide and we don't have a treaty on crimes against humanity. And so this is a picture of our first meeting in St. Louis at my campus. Shari Fassuni, who you saw in the film, is unfortunately passed now from this world to the next, but this seven of us essentially got together and said, well, why don't we write a draft? Because if there was a draft and people could see what it looked like, maybe they would be open, the international community would be open to this. And so I won't go through a lot of the details. We spent about three years working on a draft with involved 250 experts worldwide. We translated it into French. We circulated it for comment. We would periodically rip it apart and put it back together in order to account for the many, many wonderful comments. And I feel like when the final product came out, it really was a terrific document. It's published in a book on Cambridge University Press 2011 and 2013. The 2013 edition has the French and the Spanish authentic texts as well with commentaries and essays. And it evokes much of the Rome statue, right? Much of the Rome statue. Millions of individuals, particularly women and children who have been subjected to these crimes, emphasizing the commitment to spare the world community. The recurrence. So very similar language to what we have in the Rome statute have agreed as follows. And I'm not going to into our draft that much. It was very gratifying to see our book on the table when the international law commission was working. So I think in terms of seeing actual impact, we were super happy. I will add one thing because I think it's something to look for as the ILC work progresses as we hope it will, which is it is important to have the state responsibility dimension of it as well as the international criminal. That's why you really do need the treaty aspect of it. Floating out in customary international law doesn't give you some of the elements you need for clear articulation of values and norms that you can get in treaty language. Now, states don't want to hear that they can be held responsible. So this language has come out of the international law commission draft. At the same time, it is clear from the commentary that the members of the commission felt that Bosnia versus Serbia was correctly decided. And that states indeed would incur responsibility. So our proposed conventions sort of have these four aspects to it. It had a normative dimension that we don't want this called only crimes against humanity because in fact crimes against humanity is the central category. We're always debating in the international world about whether something is genocide instead of talking about crimes against humanity, which is a difficult crime to prove, right? There's nothing easy about proving, especially if you keep the state policy element of the crime or organizational policy. But it is important that we make that normative shift, I think away from protecting just four groups to protecting larger elements of society, prevention, punishment and capacity building. We took that you would have a Rome statute definition. The international law commission took exactly the same perspective, although we'll see they did vary it in a couple of ways. And of course, as I said, it will provide this horizontal enforcement mechanism that will complement the Rome statute system. So I'm not going to go through all of this. But this is basically, and I can give Professor Varkey the PowerPoint afterwards. We recognize state responsibility, classic international penal convention imposes a duty on states to criminalize, I'll deteriorate out through the car, requires some measures against hate, speed and incitement. I do think that's an important element of our treaty that is not in the international law draft because the ILC is really giving something that then states will take as a platform of negotiation. But I do think that's something to think about conferring jurisdiction on the ICJ, modes of liability as well as command responsibility and superior orders should be in there. The question is, what do you do about the statute of limitation, immunities, amnesties, maybe some eat them non-reformant. What about victims? Should they have special status? Should they have a right to reparations? A lot has changed since the genocide convention was adopted in 1948. And we now have the UN impunity guidelines which give a right to truth as well as a right to reparations. And that shows up in the enforced disappearance convention as well. We had much, much more expansive notions of mutual legal assistance and cooperation, building not on the genocide convention and Geneva law, but on the legal and international treaties on corruption and organized crime, which is also something that the ILC took up in its project, although less effective. Personally, I want a treaty monitoring body. That's not a popular view. We could debate that in the Q&A, but I think a treaty without a monitoring body is basically going to be an orphan. And I don't want this convention to be an orphan. It could also create a trust fund, but I think the first thing that came up to us was states need incentives to ratify. States need incentive to sign. And state capacity building is one of the ways to avoid the commission of these crimes. And so thinking about that would be important. This is just a translation. Again, you can read, we now have it in Arabic, Chinese, German, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish on our website. And so it is accessible in many languages. So in the little movie you saw noted, we moved it then when the International Law Commission picked it up in 2013. And so now let's fast forward to where we are today. So in 2013, Professor Sean Murphy, he had come to our meeting at Brookings and when he was elected to the ILC decided that this would be a great project for him. He proposed it to a working group and it was placed on the long-term program of work of the commission. So in 2014 we held a conference that's with the Professor Shavis in the movie is speaking at the 2014 conference where the ILC then voted to push it to the active agenda of the commission and start preparing draft articles. I won't say it was 100% unanimous. I think there were members of the commission that thought maybe we don't need a draft articles. We should just have guidelines or sort of some commentary. But overall the commission was very enthusiastic about this work. You can see from my slide Professor Murphy produced four reports. In 2017 after the third report, the commission adopted a first set of articles on draft reading and I can talk about this. I'm just going to go through it quickly now. And what I noticed and I've published an article along on this along with a colleague at WashU, a colleague at the University of Maryland, George every time more text would emerge, states would get less concerned and a little bit more enthusiastic about the project. And I think it's because as the text emerge, states could become comfortable with what this would actually look like. So you weren't just shooting down an idea. You were actually responding to specific articles. And so as the commission did a first report and a second report came out with the 2017 draft articles. Overall state reaction was very positive. There were then comments from governments and NGOs in 2018 while the first draft rested essentially. And then a fourth report came out by Professor Murphy that went to the commission in plenary debate in 2019, went back to the drafting committee and a second reading issued in 2019. And then we put a little graphic here. I'm very proud of having learned to do this. So you're being subjected to my PowerPoint skills. But this is really interesting because lots of states and lots of NGOs did weigh in. And between that first and second reading when the first reading was open for comments. And the commission, a secretariat tells us that this is a, this is a record actually, they've never had so many comments on one of their projects. And so they could sense lots of enthusiasm, as well as, you know, states advocating for different aspects of it. So this is the preamble of the ILC draft. A couple of points very similar to ours. This is a very important point that it's a use Kogan's crime. They didn't include a Martin's clause. So I'm cranky at the commission about that, but maybe states can put it back in. So I think that's a very, very nice. Very nicely done here, writes of victims, witnesses and others. Duty of every state to exercise its criminal jurisdiction. Does have a shout out to the Rome statue to the international criminal court. We thought it was very important to keep that connection to the ICC. And then again, mutual legal assistance. So let me talk about a couple of things the ILC did that are very similar to ours. We thought about article seven, three of the Rome statute on gender, that very confusing provision has been deleted. That was between the 2017 and 2019 drafts in response to state comment. And we could talk about that in the Q and A. They. They also changed persecution. Now persecution in the Rome statute talks about in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the court. And that actually broadens the definition of persecution, because it means that you can have persecution tied at the ICC to a war crime. Right. So if you think of attacks on shrines in Mali, or attacks on cultural heritage, or even purely based property crimes, could be the linkage that you need for persecution as a crime against humanity in the Rome statute. The ILC has actually deleted that and has limited persecution to other acts relating to crimes against humanity. I've written several letters. I'm not a big fan of this change that the original language of course had to be changed because it was very specific to the ICC, but I'm not sure that the limitation now is serving us in the way that we did. The ILC has 15 draft articles. It's a fairly short text. The commentary is extremely long, but not the text. You would expect not to commit to prevent and punish the prevention dimension from our sort of model draft. Did make it into the commission draft, which is great. There's a provision on non-refulment criminalization under national law. They've added now along the lines of something we had included in the commission draft. So that's a terrific addition, I think, and that is starting to be seen as important. I put the entire establishment of national jurisdiction in only because you are going to see universal jurisdiction here. It is important. It's not mandatory in the sense that a state always has the option to try or to extradite, but it is a form of universal jurisdiction if other forms of jurisdiction don't work. And I think that's a very important addition to the treaty. Then the other provisions of the ILC draft cover investigation, preliminary measures, on battery out to you to Kari, which is nice because it has an option to transfer to an international criminal tribunal as well, which is progressive. So-called triple option here. And some provisions on fair treatment and be alleged and offender on victims and witnesses, and then extradition mutual legal assistance. And an ICJ dispute resolution clause with negotiation or arbitration as preliminary options for a state and with a possible opt out. Now, most states don't opt out. So it is nice to give states options. That would be a great way to combine it with a no reservations provision is to give states opt outs in specific areas. But it does have an ICJ clause with an opt out. So I've already mentioned these are some of the things not in the treaty or that maybe we want to revisit if this ever gets out of the sixth committee where it is now currently in a cycle. So the Martin's clause and the preamble, the definition of persecution, maybe revisiting incitement, that was very, very close at the commission. There was a lot of intervention on this point because incitement to crimes against humanity is a classic offense, right? That was actually charged at Nuremberg because Vanshirak and Stryker were charged with Nazi propaganda essentially attacking Jews as part of the crime against humanity charges against them. Human rights organizations would like a definition of victim. They would also like a prohibition on the use of military courts. They would like a prohibition on amnesties. The commission did not touch that. We didn't either. The question of immunities is in there, but it's a little bit softer. And this is something that we need to be looking at because of course the ILC is also working on this question. And there have been seven members of the commission that have suggested there is no use Cogan's exception for immunity from national jurisdiction. And that's an area of controversy. And then the question of the treaty monitoring mechanism, the commission's view is that was best left to states. They weren't going to go there. They wanted to produce something fairly streamlined. As one member of the commission said to me, Layla, we don't want a Christmas tree approach. We want something that states will be able to take, but we don't want a Christmas tree approach. And that's a fair enough. Perspective, I think. So where are we? So it went in 2019. And in 2019. The commission recommended the elaboration of a convention by the GA or by an international conference of plenipotentiaries on the basis of, oh, sorry. Of the draft articles. This was the commission's recommendation. And that was the commission's recommendation. And that was the commission's recommendation. And that's part because the commission's report came in in August, the six committee met in September. And a lot of states said, we want more time. This is a lot to digest. We're just not ready. So they kind of punted and said, look, we'll pop it over till the next year. Austria with 42 other states. Austria actually offered to host a diplomatic. Conference at that point. And many states expressed enthusiasm, but it sort of got into the, it's, you know, we need more time for study. This is great, but we're not sure. And there's something called the mutual legal assistance treaty that also was playing into states. We're a little bit confused about how they would relate. So it, um, the general assembly took note and said, we're going to roll it over. Well, so I'm going to come back to these, but essentially I've been tracking every comment by every government since this happened. And remember how I said in, at the beginning, like they're just starting. And so there were some negatives here. There are some no strong positives like states are excited, ready to do this. I could give you the language we use for our coding. But you can see that the positives increase. A lot over time, right? And the neutral is sort of like states want to commend the international law commission for its excellent work on crimes against humanity. Blah, blah, blah, blah state has these comments without really arguing, right, whether this is up to the first reading. And then on the first reading, looking at the state comments, you can see states are overwhelming. The states that are writing in, and this is a large number of states. I think there were actually 38, but one is it depends on whether you code the Nordic countries because they make one statement for five countries, that sort of thing. So the coding is a little bit trickier than it might seem. Same thing in 2019 and 2020, we see more positivity in the state. We see more positivity in the state. We see more positivity in the state. In 2019 and 2020, we see more positivity, but you also start to see a little bit more like, yes, this is a great idea, but we don't want to develop a convention yet. We want to study. So what's interesting is as the commission was drafting, you see increased positivity, enthusiasm from states. And then as states are actually asked to take a decision. And then as the commission is asked to take a decision. And then as the commission is asked to take a decision, whether it's friendly or to a working group and begin negotiations, states getting a little bit more concerned about, do we need time? Do we need to go back to capitals, et cetera. So in 2020, we had a technical rollover essentially because with the pandemic, there was not much that could be done. There were states ready to go in that were very active, that were very excited about this treaty. So we had to sit in the Vienna cafe and talk about this or have any kind of discussion in person other than the formal meetings that were being held in person. Mexico at that point laid down a marker with 13 other states, including France and Germany. And it, you know, states that had supported Austria, but were also important in many ways saying, you know, we, we need to be ready for a deeper and substantive negotiation on the topic. And we hope to revisit the agenda item with a constructive and flexible approach to break the inertia. So 2021 approaches. Maybe some of you are familiar with Bill Murray's famous movie Groundhog Day. But the question is what is going to happen in 2021. And along with my colleagues and many representatives of the committee, I think we have a lot of comments that are very frustrated that we can't break the long jam of the consensus voting in the sixth committee to get this into an ad hoc committee or negotiations. We hope to move it forward. So thank you so much for your kind attention. And now maybe we can have questions because I see many are showing up in the chat. Exactly. Leila, thank you so very much for this. I think it's a clear description, you know, of the development of the initial idea of your initiative in 2008 up to where we are today before the ALC and all the delays due to different reasons. Say that I remember myself being in Galway, you know, in 2008, 2009 and Bill was coming and he was talking about the initiatives. I remember very, very clearly having say that because as you say, we have about, we have at least 11 questions, you know, and I don't want to take more time from the attendees. I tend to collect three questions at the beginning. Is that okay with you, you know, three, four, try to make three, four, three rounds. If that's okay with you. Do if you, if you still. Yeah, yeah. No, it's good. And I have a pen. Okay. Excellent. So I have open. Okay. I will start with the professor James go question. With some. Okay. So James road getting away from only crimes against humanities welcome and restoring the standing of crimes against humanity, but will the convention not quite possibly limit the scope for customer evolution interpretation that has occurred in the national criminal judicial bodies. One reason for the only is the genocide has been approached in a hyper narrow and conservative way while crimes against humanity has been ex ex expanded. So what are the risks and advantages of getting the convention in terms of interpretation and customary law and how this will impact on the national criminal cases. Is that okay if I continue with. Yes, yes, yes. I will try. I mean, not all questions are long enough. So the next one is about. Our attendee asked about the focus. So he says the draft convey articles on crimes against humanities stipulate explicitly in article three that it's state has the obligation not to engage in acts that constitute crimes against humanity. The commentary to this article adds that states have obligation not to engage in acts that constitute crimes against humanity. So the next paragraph of the national law not to aid or assist another state. The next paragraph of the commentary moves on to discuss articles that is second paragraph, which is the obligation to prevent the pannies. So the question is why has the international law commission devoted more space at that attention to the obligation to prevent the obligation of non assistance. So the next paragraph of the national law. Can we say something about the perception of hierarchy between genocide crimes against humanity? What about when prosecution is secured for crimes against humanity, but not genocide because of the intent can be because the genocide that intent cannot be proved victims often seem to fill this is a loss. I think I can stop here. Is that okay with you? Oh my God. Thank you so much. I'll try to summarize. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm actually, I'm actually looking at some of the questions as well. So I'll try to wrap some of the other because I know we might not reach all of them. So the question of this relationship between customary international law and treaty codification is a great one. And it's something that we debated a lot. It's something that shows up in the international law and it shows up in the international law. So there's lots of advantages with treaty codification that you can't have with customary international law. It's true. You can have, you can have development under customary international law, although it's not clear to me that any future international criminal tribunals would necessarily be created that would be able to do the kinds of things we saw at the Yugoslavia tribunal, for example, where they said it's a conflict linkage looking at the, right, that there was, there was a moment in time. Right now we have the Rome statute. It's adopted by 160 negotiated by 165 countries and adopted by 123. And so even if it wasn't customary international law at the time it was negotiated and many people participating in our project argued in particular the state policy element was not part of customary international law. As this audience knows under the North Sea continental shelf jurisprudence right there. I call it the three C's. You can have codification in a treaty. You can crystallize in a treaty or you can create customary international law in a treaty. And so ultimately I think most of us believe that the state policy elements, state or organizational policy element is here to stay. If it wasn't part of custom it probably has become so much and it was impractical to think that the dude that that you could put into a treaty something that was different than was in the Rome statute for that reason. That doesn't mean that states can't do more so think about Spain's incrimination of genocide which added political groups or think about states that vary and want to take more progressive, you know, views on sexual orientation or elements that they want to protect. It is possible for a state in incorporating an international crime to modify I would say that the international definition is a floor they can't make it more regressive than the international definition but can they make it more progressive. Yes. As part of their national legislation. I think that raises some conceptual issues with respect to universal jurisdiction because but we've seen it before right this is something we have to live with which is that states will in fact vary the definition of crimes. So I think you get so many advantages from codification that thinking about the disadvantage in terms of freezing custom in place states still are free to modify the definitions and one of my slides refers to positivistic elements in the commentary. The commentary drops a couple of little notes occasionally saying of course it states change the definition at all they can't use the rest of the treaty. And honestly, that very positivistic approach is not how we approach international criminal law, not just with respect to the court crimes but the transnational crimes where states often will vary the definitions and still demand extradition or still engage in mutual legal assistance. So I do not believe this treaty means that states have to super copy each provision into their national legislation. Yeah. In terms of obligation to prevent versus non-assistance no idea why the commission did that. I'm sorry. But I do think the articles on prevention are a plus in terms of hierarchy. Oh goodness, you know, genocide has been called the crime of crimes. And yet at the same time you have many judges saying there are there is no hierarchy between crimes. I think the hierarchy idea. I don't know. It persists whether or not we think it's useful or whether we think it's technically correct. And that's why most scholars have, and I noticed there was a question about why interpret genocide or restrictively. And it's essentially because it has been done that way. And we're not going to go back and change the Yugoslavia Tribunal jurisprudence on that, which is a quite restrictive reading of the genocide convention. The ICC has quoted that, that restrictive jurisprudence. And the ICC elements even add manifest pattern to genocide. They make it even harder to show genocide than at the ICTY and the ICTR. So I don't think we're going to get away from that. I think genocide is perceived as a crime that is essentially a monument to the Holocaust. But what we have to be careful about is that in invoking it and having that as our only treaty means that there's so many cases of mass atrocity that can't get any attention from states because you can't call it genocide. And that's really what, if you'd like to say the normative thrust of this development is, but this is crimes against humanity. So don't hide behind the fact that you can't find the specific intent to destroy, right? You have to look for other things. Thank you so much, Leila. I know that the format of the discussion is that the attendees cannot see the questions, but I'm reading those questions, you know, the same, the same way that Leila is doing. So I'm going to proceed with the second round of questions. There is a personal question for you. What was the, what was the point? What was this, the key element that made you, you know, initiate all this campaign? And how do you feel now that you see, you know, all this campaign brought before the general assembly before the six committees? So I don't know if you want to talk about that now or towards the end, or I can add some more questions. You can add more. I mean, for me, essentially it was the dissents in Bosnia versus Serbia. It was the dissents that really went through the, they wanted to find genocide, right? The dissents said, come on. But, but what kept striking me there is, but this is all crimes against humanity. These are terrible crimes, right? The fact that we only have a genocide convention doesn't make any sense. And I remember calling Richard Goldstone, who was one of the first people I called when I thought of doing this, I had just been appointed director to the institute. And I said, Richard, you want to write crimes against humanity treaty? And he said, Bosnia versus Serbia. He said, is this about Bosnia versus Serbia? I think there was just a sense that it was a great case. And yet it was unsatisfactory on so many levels. I see. Okay. Thank you for that. So the next question is that it's about the use Coggins, usually, you know, the, the controversy with use Coggins and the different positions before the international law commissions, law commissions. So the question is how important do you think that the final inclusion, inclusion needs, you know, for the, for the prohibition of crimes against humanity is a use Coggins norm. One more question we have about the criminalization, to what extent, you know, this convention, its effect on its application, you know, how the ICC will apply, you know, if it is substantiated, you know, to what extent, whether the legal implications, you know, before the ICC, I think you have responded about, you have covered the genocidal crimes against humanity. So the issue of codification. There is a question about, yeah, I think you, you gave us the plan about the supporters and critiques of the arguments before the sixth committee of the General Assembly, but I guess we won names. I mean, there is, which countries are more supportive or not. One more question about, about the arguments before the IELTS international law commissions surrounding civilians versus military courts. And the final question I would say, yeah, let's stop here, you know, Leila, and maybe, you know, I can, we can have a final round where I think they fit together, you know. Yes. So use Kogan's, you know, in a way this harkens back to the customary international law question, because look, I started in this field in the 1990s. I'm very old and there were many people writing in this field and the early framing that I really studied of international criminal law for the court crimes, right? Because in America we often use ICL to also mean the transnational crimes. But for the court crimes is you go back to Nuremberg and I read a lot of the French and the Swiss and the conceptualizations, whether it was even before that, Pella and Don Adieu de Vabre, and then Cassez and Bassuni picked this up. And so the conceptualization really at the founding of the modern explosion of ICL was that you had these prescriptive norms that were created by the international community, their international crimes, stricto senso created by the international community, right? And associated with those crimes is this sort of super status, which at Nuremberg managed to, as I read that little phrase where it said it didn't matter that your law authorized everything you did, because international law could have spent essentially displace national law in that case. And implicit in that notion of hierarchy that these are use Cogan's crimes is that they're associated with a specific procedural regime as well. The forensic case in the ICTY articulates that very, very clearly that the fact that it's torture also, which is a use Cogan's crime, the prohibition on torture gives rise to universal jurisdiction. It prohibits immunities and it also eliminates statutes of limitation. So the use Cogan's status, if you think that Ferenja was correct and that international court crimes stricto senso have not just a prescriptive dimension but have a procedural regime that's associated with them that's critically important and important to articulate. There wasn't so much debate at the commission really on whether that language should go in. And it often argued, well, you know, you don't need to say it, everybody knows it. And a few members of the commission said, we think it's important actually to put it in on the basis that maybe people might forget it. Now there's another branch of thinking. There's another way of thinking now that you're seeing at the commission, you saw it in the jurisdictional immunities case at the ICJ. You see it in the recent French decision involving, I just read the general opinion in a recent case where there were French national survivors of torture by the United States trying to bring a case against American officials and the French court said they're immune. Now the German federal court just said, no, there's no immunity on official torture on state crimes. And we've just got a very interesting North Korean case, but this question of whether you can have immunities, whether there's an exception from immunity for criminal prosecution, I think it's being debated right now. And so this treaty really to have needs to have this use-coken status. So that was a very long-winded answer. The ICC, the ICC is really going to be happy about this treaty, right? Because so many Rome statute parties have not incorporated the ICC provisions into their national legislation because the ICC treaty doesn't actually require them to do so. It would like them to do so. They're supposed to do that, but they don't actually have to. There's no specific obligation in the Rome statute of incorporating Rome statute crimes into national legislation. This treaty would have that. And of course the ICC then could rely on national jurisprudence in trying to interpret, you know, the system with article 21 of the Rome statute, but it could rely on national jurisprudence as a way to, you know, if there were unexplained provisions or areas of ambiguity that could be a source, either, you know, 21C or either general principles of law or even part of customary international law. So customary international law will always continue to sneak in. Never, never fear. There, I think I'll stop there. And if I, I don't want to make you tired about that, but I think there are two questions, you know, that they fit. So one of the, it is, what do you think is the biggest embediment, you know, to this draft convention, what has been and to what extent, you know, the change with the current American administration, what extent, you know, gains on your side of the Atlantic, what does that mean? You know, what does that could potentially mean? And there is another question, sorry, I chose now for the time, for the interest of time, which is always the controversial concept of universal jurisdiction to what extent, you know, this, but about the nature of controversial, of universal jurisdiction and to what extent, you know, it can have a better future. So these two questions. Okay, so on the change in the US administration, I sleep a lot better at night. I'll say that, you know, I'm special advisor to the ICC prosecutor and the courts under sanctions, as well as the prosecutor and one of her deputies. And it has been extremely traumatic to say the least for those of us that care about these issues, even tangentially. And for those of us working directly with the court that's been sanctioned under a US law that we usually apply to deal with terrorist activities, it has been slightly terrifying. So I'm actually a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the former Trump administration, trying to encourage the current administration to rescind the executive order that imposed the sanctions on this. And so, you know, one of the difficulties is where we don't want the US position on this treaty to be coming out of sort of trying to reboot the relationship with the International Criminal Court in my, you know, my separate hat is I would really like the United States to reboot the relationship with the ICC, because the ICC look if it didn't exist, you'd have to invent it. You know, the Biden administration wants to talk all about Myanmar and how terrible the coup is, and we have to stop this. And the natural instinct is say, yeah, this is why you have the ICC, right? And that's not the only thing you're looking at, but these are certainly terrible crimes. And one of the things that's tricky about the Sixth Committee, and I saw a lot of questions, I can't name countries, obviously, but the Sixth Committee is tricky because it operates on the basis of consensus. So even though you get piles and piles and piles of states, Austria, I was there in 2019, we're going to have a diplomatic conference. I was so excited. I'm like, I don't tweet. But if I was tweeting, I would be tweeting it out, right? And then it just takes one or two states to say, oh, you know, we need further study. This is very complicated. In 2019, that was credible. In 2021, come on, you've had two years to read the draft. It's pretty short. Actually, you have time. So what are the obstacles? One obstacle is just the pandemic. The pandemic has really been sucking up a ton of energy. And it's very difficult to make progress forward, leaning progress on new agenda items. States have become more reactive because they're just exhausted and busy like the rest of us are. And until we get a little bit of calming there, I think it's going to be difficult. It's also difficult when you can't meet in person and have those conversations. And I think there is a core group of state and that mutual legal assistance treaty, which basically took the annexes from our project, put them in a separate freestanding convention and said, let's have a MLA convention for all the core crimes. That's been kind of confusing things because states don't really understand how does that relate to a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty. So that process was supposed to be finished last June. They also have not made progress. So I'm not really sure where they are. The nice thing about that process is that their draft calls for their treaty to come into force with two ratifications. So literally, and they don't, it's not a UN treaty. So they don't need the United Nations to go forward. They could have 15 governments, have a conference, you know, adopt their treaty, and two states would ratify it and maybe don't. And we could turn our attention back to the bigger treaty, which is really tricky, which is this new global convention. What are the obstacles? You know, the obstacles in global justice are states worry that they might be subjected to the provisions. It's prospective only like so many things, but there's always that concern. And right now there is the bandwidth problem. If you're interested in helping, you know, we're working together with a lot of colleagues, a lot of governments that have been very, very committed to this project for a very, very long time. It's been really gratifying to see to try to get it moved out of the sixth committee into an ad hoc committee, maybe of the General Assembly, like the ICC statute was the ILC draft emerged that way from the sixth committee. And then it could be the subject of further study and preparation. And at that point, a lot of the questions there about should we reopen this? Should we add that? Should we do that? That would all be discussed in the General Assembly. It will help having a new U.S. administration that will undoubtedly it's already said we want to we're observed observing at the Human Rights Council. We have a new human rights agenda. It's a multilateralist government. Certainly that is going to help with respect to some states that are not very committed to these principles that were otherwise able to play more of a spoiler role in the sixth committee. And that's kind of all I'm going to say on that. Excellent. Leila, thank you so very much, you know, for this very, very rich discussion. I can tell you that personally the last five years I'm overwhelmed with reading, you know, about the backlash against multilateralism, the darkness of international law. That nothing works, you know, that states do not want to commit to any international legal treaty. They avoid legally binding obligation. They prefer what we call soft law. So somehow personally, despite this delay, you know, and based on the comment you say, you know, somehow I think you give us a sense of hope. I get a positive feeling, which I haven't felt for a long time now. I can tell you, you know, especially when it comes to things being progressed, despite, you know, all these delays, whether it was epidemic or whether there are other considerations, whether it's the universal jurisdiction, whether, whether, you know, I think this is quite kind of the light, you know, it gives us some positive feeling. And on this note, I don't know how to thank you on behalf of my colleagues of our department of all the attendees for providing us for spending one hour with us, explaining so clearly, but also critically and managing to address so many questions, we can speak for hours. I know that we cannot do justice, neither to your initiative or to the ILC draft articles, but I'm very, very grateful, you know, for the energy and the clarification you provided to all of us. And thank you so much. And I hope that if it's not in May, maybe November, we will see. Absolutely. And thank you for all the great questions. I'm really, really thrilled to have been able to do this. This is a really important initiative. And look, the pandemic has showed us, you know, we're all we're all in this together, you know, we're all in the same storm. As they say, we may be in different boats, but we are all in the same storm on this planet. And so we have to work together in order to be able to make positive change. And I have some faith in the future that we will be able to do so. So thank you, Maria. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and have a lovely evening. You all are off to your I guess you can't go to the pub because of the pandemic, but you're off to your tea time. And I'm actually going to teach my classes this afternoon. So So thank you so much. Thank you all for attending. And I'm looking forward to further discussions in person soon. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Maria. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you, Dani, once more. Thank you. Bye-bye.