 Wel, gweithdo i'r ysgol yw'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. You join us at an exciting time. The building site you just saw outside will, over the next 18 months, be transformed into a state of the art facility housed in the School of Law as the sole academic department within the north block of Senate House. In tandem with our physical transformation, we are introducing radical new undergraduate and postgraduate degree structures a gafodd y syniad, a'r hyllidol ystod o gael a'r syniad ar y gyfyrdd yma i'r ymddangos llwyddiol yma. Yr unrhyw o amsgolwyddiol o'r bydd ymweld yw'r ysgolwyddiol, ymddangos o'r wrthynag ymddangos ar y cyflwyno ymddangos a'r hyn yn ddeithasol i'r bydd ymddiol, ymddangos cyfnodol, yn cynnigau ei ddweithlig a'r ysgolwyddiol, wedi ei wneud o'r traddifenu, o'r cyfnodol i'r gwybodaethau, ac i chi'n gynhwyl llawol yn ymllun o'u cyllid yma. As yw'r perlwyr ar y dyfodol, ydy'r ydych chi'n gweithio ar gyfer y byd yn ymlaen, yn cyflawni'r cohort yn ymlaenio a'u gwaith ar gyfer y stafel ar gyfer yma. As ydych chi'n grotio o'r defnyddio'r flwyddyn a'r gwnaeth, yr ymddwn i'r gwneud honno yn ymddangosol, yr ymddangosol, yr ymddangosol, yr ymddangosol a'r ymddangosol. A'r ymddangosol ymddangosol ymlaen, Felly, ymlaen i'r cyd-deg, yma mae'r cyd-deg yn ei ffordd ar y cyd-deg, mae'r Ffwrdd Pwgol Llywodraeth wedi'i gael y cerddau yn ystod fwych yn ymryd i'n credu yr oedlawni, ond mae'n gweithio'n cyd-deg. Felly, yn y ffwrdd yw'r cyd-deg yw'r Llywodraeth Llywodraeth Llywodraeth, mae'n gweithio'n cyd-deg yn yr ymlaenol am y dyfodol, neu'r cyd-deg, ar gyfwyr y cyd-deg, niall gwybod yn ei gweld a'r gwrddion yn ôl yn gwybod ni'n gweithio i roedden nhw, Gwyddoch yn Gwyddoch yn Gwyddoch yn Gweithdoch yn gweithio i roedden nhw'n gyfweld ar y lefnodau lleol. Rwy'n cael ei ffrifio hefyd ymlaen i'r gwirioneddau yn trefnoddau ystafell â'r gweithio ar y lefnodau lleol, ac yn achos gyfweld a'r amser o'i gwirioneddau o'r gwirionedd o'r gradiadau. Yn dweud, mae'n dweud ei wneud, я sy'n amser oedd i'r cyfeirio arall. Befnwyd wedi nhw'r gweithio yn meddwl i'w lleoli'u gwiswrein adlu y gadeginnol ynghylch ar eich cyfroedd o'r ymlawr, bydd er mwyn arweithio yn cyfeirio'u gwyloedd gwmpelolau. Rwyfwn i'n gwybod pa wrth gwrs, wedi'u gweithio i Jeffrey Ibarrewyr mewn gweithfawr yn ei gweithtu bwydigol, ei gweithdd arweithi'w lleoli. A'r gweithwyr â'r gweithwyr. Rwyf yn gweithio, Jeffrey C. V puts us me in mortals to shame. A Rhodes Scholar, who studied law at the University of Sydney in Oxford, was called to the bar in 1973 and took silk in 1988. Jeffrey has appeared in many of the landmark media, constitutional and criminal law cases of the last 40 years, both in this country and beyond, including the prosecution of General Pinochet and Hastings Bander and the defence of Salomon Rushdie and Julian Assange. He's also appeared in several hundred reported cases in the Court of Appeal and made a large number of submissions before the House of Lords, Privy Council and laterally the Supreme Court of course. He's also sat on the other side of the bench as a UN Appeals Judge and as President of the War Crimes Court in Sierra Leone, which indicted Charles Taylor. At this point in my notes I'd scribbled, Jeffrey is the type of high achiever that reminds me why I decided not to go to the bar, but then I looked at his academic achievements. His book on international law, Crimes against Humanity, is now in its fourth edition and doubtless sells more in a week than my term on property law, still in its first edition, has sold in the past five years, notwithstanding my captive audience of eager and not-so-eager second year-sized property students. Add to that a host of learned articles and various other monographs and I now I'm questioning how I have a temerity to even describe myself as an academic. Suffice to say that Jeffrey is a leading figure in both the theory and practice of law and it's our pleasure to welcome you to sewers this evening and to hear whether international justice is indeed a contradiction in terms. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeffrey Robertson QC. Well thank you Paul for that over kind introduction. It is a good time to be talking and thinking about international justice because all of a sudden there's not very much of it around. I say all of a sudden because if you think back just three years to 2011 its future seemed assured. Miladig and Karagich were on trial. The architects of genocide at Srebrenica. Charles Taylor had been convicted for mass murder and mass mutilation in Sierra Leone. Laurent Gabot would be the next up at the ICC, the International Criminal Court, for war crimes in Cote d'Ivoire. The Security Council seemed to have adopted the responsibility to protect doctrine requiring humanitarian intervention and prosecution for crimes against humanity and Colonel Gaddafi was the first to be indicted under it. But Scheer had been indicted over genocide in Darfur, Peniatur and Ruto over that brutal election violence in Kenya and on the streets of Damascus hundreds of brave young students had begun their march under banners that read Alasad to the Hague. Well most of them are now dead. Their hopes trampled along with their banners and I think they wrote an apology or at least an explanation for why international justice so failed them. It created expectations that we can see in 2015 and should have seen in 2011 have not been fulfilled and perhaps cannot be fulfilled. The point at which Assad should have been indicted was after a month of bloody Sundays when his troops had mown down several hundred and then several thousand at that stage peaceful protesters and when the protests had in consequence become not so peaceful and he'd burnt a few hundred by using chemical weapons 73 nations at the General Assembly called upon the Security Council to refer him to the ICC prosecutor. Of course Russia, his great ally, simply vetoed the resolution joined by China which is generally not always opposed to international justice. Bashir still structs the African stage. The prosecutor has in effect dropped the case telling the Security Council last October that she's given up because states even those that have ratified the treaty, the Rome Treaty will not do their duty to arrest him. The trials of Kenyatta and Ruto have collapsed through intimidation of witnesses sabotage of the trial by the Kenyan government according to its prosecutor. The African Union has mounted a campaign to neuter the ICC calling it a colonial court with a fixation on Africa notwithstanding that almost all its actions relating to Africa have been either requested by African states themselves or directed by the Security Council. Libya refuses the court's direction to hand over Gaddafi Junior for trial although I think his mansion in Hampstead is still being squatted and no doubt the LSE are still profiting from his donations. Rafiq Harari's murder remains unsolved despite an international court that's been working on it for years and of course and always there is to be impunity for the torturers of the CIA and of course for any Russians included in the downing of the Malaysian airliner. And in Bangladesh so-called international justice has become truly oxymoronic and international crimes tribunal is there busy sentencing to death for international crimes those who just happen to be leaders of the opposition. 15 of them have been sentenced so far and one has gone to the gallows after many thousands of Bengalis protested because they thought that he was only getting life imprisonment. So is the world abandoning the fight against impunity or have we come far enough in the delivery of what I'd call the Nuremberg legacy so the namely that perpetrators of great crimes must be punished for the sake of their victims for the sake of deterrence that we have enough precedents enough principles and institutions to recover from our current setbacks. It's ironic to read the general assembly debates on the ICC a couple of months ago its chief defenders were Cyprus Australia and Montenegro its chief opponents were Sudan, Syria and Senegal although neither Sudan nor Syria had ratified the Rome Treaty but they were calling as were other states for a reversion to state sovereignty to what international lawyers call the principles of Westphalia. Now that's a reference to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 that settled the Thirty Years War upon principles that lasted for several centuries and are being reasserted today the principles of Machiavelli set out in his book The Prince and endowing the prince the king the emperor the leader with sovereignty that was unassailable except in relation to aliens who may be within his territory in relation to the treatment of his own people the prince could not be called to account and that Westphalian sovereignty principle has as I say been the law of nations it certainly survived until Nuremberg established international criminal law and there are calls around the general assembly for it to for us to revert to it. The best thing about the Treaty of Westphalia I always think is that England wasn't part of it it only three months later we put our king Charles the first on trial charged with war crimes with torture of prisoners with pillage and the statute that put him on trial reads thus it is setting up a trial for the king I quote to the end that no chief officer of state may contrive the enslaving or destroying of the English nation and expect impunity for so doing so the word impunity in its cofiannaw and sense first comes into English law in that statute of the prompt there is to be no matter no matter how high you are no matter what diplomatic protection you may have you can have there is a rule of law above you but there never was a rule of international law until quite recently in the 19th century we got as far as accepting that piracy was an international crime and there was universal jurisdiction any country who captured a pirate could hang him or occasionally her from the arm or from the whatever gallows could be set up piracy was the first international crime and then gradually we had slavery certainly in the 19th century Britain and it was until I think 1878 and the Treaty of Berlin that other countries agreed to outlaw piracy there was the first international court was proposed in 1821 to be set up in Sierra Leone in order to grant piracy warrants warrants to intercept ships suspect and seas ships suspected of piracy and it was to have a british a french and a an american judge the americans pulled out at the last moment plus a shawnt but that was a start the idea of humanitarian intervention had actually been pioneered by Cromwell and his Kissinger who was the poet Milton in relation to the Duke of Savoy way back in the 1650s who had threatened any of his own citizens who didn't convert to Catholicism would be hanged and Cromwell and Milton threatened intervention by british forces if he carried out this dastardly plot against Protestantism but it was I think the Hellenic movement which really led of course by Lord Byron and by the poets really did first argue for the right of humanitarian intervention in Greece against the Ottoman Empire they fought and in terms that are very have become very familiar over recent years over the question of whether Britain should intervene they fought of course against the great Tory real politician Lord Castle Ray the foreign secretary who felt that we shouldn't no matter what atrocities the Turks committed we should keep them as a bastion against Russian expansion and for Byron and the Hellenic movement it was essential that Britain should intervene to prevent atrocities and Castle Ray of course was condemned by Shelley was condemned by Byron posterior after Castle Ray died Byron wrote posterity shall nears survey a finer grave than this here lies the bones of Castle Ray stop traveller and piss it was that was the of course the Hellenic movement triumph Britain did intervene it led the first I suppose modern intervention in the battle of Navarino where the British fleet with the French and Russian ships defeated the Turkish and Egyptian fleet and paved the way for Greek independence in 1832 we didn't didn't give them back the marbles but we gave them independence and I like to think that the first real the first amazing support it was amazing for the idea of international courts and international arbitration came from in 1870 from William Gladstone it came over the Alabama which was a ship that had been sunk by the British Navy wrongly at the time it was a long standing dispute between America and Britain which they finally agreed to submit to an international court it was I suppose the first international court it had a judge from Britain a judge from the United States and judges from Italy Switzerland and Brazil and it awarded massive damages against Britain quite unfair damages looking at the case and Gladstone said this harsh in its extent and punitive in its basis this judgment is yet it is as dust in the balance compared with a moral example of set by two proud nations going in peace and concord before a judicial tribunal instead of resorting to the arbitrement of the sword well they were fine words and it was a fine example and people started to write seriously about the prospect of international courts after the alabama arbitration but none had arrived by the time of the first world war if you read Oppenheim and the the classic texts on international law in that period use these statements of the kind no matter what atrocities are perpetrated within a sovereign state Westphalia and principles preclude any intervention even the purges of the Jews in Kishineve and so on were mentioned as being incapable under law of calling for international help and the first time we get that call is in 1915 and what was truly the Armenian genocide after the Dardanelles on the eve of the Dardanelles invasion the intellectual leaders of the two million strong Armenian community were rounded up in Constantinople now Istanbul and disappeared laws were passed requiring every Armenian to leave their homes and to march for hundreds of miles through the desert where most of the women and children died either from marauding or from rape or from typhus or starvation because they weren't given food and they ended up in concentration camps in places that we only know of because they are now occupied by ISIS and of course expropriation laws were passed for taking away all their so-called abandoned property they were forced out and expropriating their churches christian churches and their homes so that the that called forth an international declaration from britain france and russia are condemning this crime and it was first the first draft of the resolution said this was a crime against christianity the russians accurately pointed out that not everyone was christian and so they called it a crime against humanity and they promised faithfully to prosecute the perpetrators and that's that's the first time that we see this of course they didn't and hitler was able to urge his generals shortly before they invaded poland to use the most utmost severity because after all who now remembers the armenians the british remembered them long enough to round up 68 of the perpetrators in 1918 and take them to malta for trial and then they discovered that there was no international law under which they could be tried for following the orders of the young turk government they were killing armenians because of their race and religion but they were armenians within the ottoman empire and the west falian principle prevented prosecution except by an international treaty and so britain and france uh with american support at that time set up the treaty of sabras which was part of the verse ideal in which an international court would be set up to try the perpetrators of the armenian massacres uh of course that quickly dissipated russia lost interest because of the bolshevik revolution they weren't having any part of it the french did a deal with atatürk who came to take over turkey uh they wanted oil and the british slowly lost interest and sent the more prisoners uh that they held in malta back to atatürk under his promise to put them on trial of course the minute they landed uh in in constantanople they were treated as homecoming heroes and uh they were tried for there was no war crimes trial after the first world war loid george and effie smith had gone to versai on the slogan hang the kaiser they wanted the kaiser and they set up article 225 of the versai treaty has an international court five judges to try the kaiser for aggression for the invasion of belgium and for unrestricted submarine warfare they were the two crimes he was to be tried for but he was given thanks to american underhand support because wilson was very much in favour of you know of sovereign immunity they allowed him to go to holland where he lived unhung until 1941 there was an element of losers justice the the prince of wilson insisted that the germans should try their own war criminals 800 of them were tried in leipzig and uh 795 were acquitted and the others were allowed to escape so that was losers justice the league of nations had no real impact there was no uh there was an investigation into japanese crimes in manchuria the investigator lord lytton refused to travel by air and it took him nine months by ship to get there by which time the puppet state of manchukuo had been set up and much the same happened when the italians under musilini used poison gas in ethiopia in 1935 so we have a a complete failure of international law at this point to provide any sort of justice and i think interestingly enough that we can trace the beginnings to a little group of english socialists under hg wells and lord sanki who was the labour lord chancellor in the late 1930s they formed a a group to draft a binding charter of rights which would be capable of enforcement by an international court there was hg wells barbara wooton was there jb priestly a a mill would motor up from poo corner to add to the draft and it is a wonderful beautifully written document that uh sold many copies when it was published as a penguin special in 1939 and the foreign office was so entranced by the idea of ending the war and having international justice that they translated it into german and dropped it on the nazi tanks as they were coming through france uh they didn't stop to read it of course but uh the person who did was a friend of wells uh it was president rwsvelt and it went to inform his four freedoms speech that were fighting for a world based on four freedoms freedom of speech and religion freedom from hunger often forgotten and fear and the atlantic charter in january the first 1942 declared human rights as a war aim and it was then the intellectual input that led to the london charter in 1945 and to the beginning of international criminal law at the nuremberg tribe and it was a it was a near run thing i mean nuremberg really uh almost didn't happen thanks to Churchill Churchill for various reasons thought that it would be a disaster to give hitler a soap box of the dock uh his suggestion he drew up a list of the 75 top nazis and the minute they were captured they were given six hours to say their prayers and then they'd be shot and uh that was the british position as what to do with nazi war criminals truman and his friend robert jackson who became the prosecutor in nuremberg uh said in a marvelous letter to Churchill that uh this wouldn't sit on the american conscience or be remembered by our children with pride we have to give them a trial as fair as the horrors of the time permit so uh there was a complete uh standoff between britain and america over whether nuremberg would ever happen and the casting vote of course went to the third ally joe starlin who loved show trials as long as everyone got shot at the end and uh he voted for nuremberg and nuremberg 23 defendants were processed within a year um 20 were convicted somewhere and um it sat down a legacy but was it was it really a a false start for international justice or at least a bit of a deceptive start it succeeded it produced an uh a record to defy holocaust deniers uh ever since and uh it was incredibly popular uh and it's become alleged but it succeeded as jackson the prosecutor uh wrote because of the teutonic habit of writing everything down they had all the evidence they had during the signature on the night and fog decrees and and it was a relatively easy prosecution very different in seary leon and places where you have to draw inferences from mass graves where you have to protect witnesses at great expense and with some difficulty too much difficulty it turned out in the kenyata and ruto prosecutions it was also remarkable that the defendants played along i mean uh it's uh gearing initially called them all together and said look we're going to this is victor's justice we're going to say only three words to this court um the catch cry of one of girters warrior heroes loosely translated as kiss my ass and uh as time went by they realised they were going to get a fair crack of the whip they were going to be able to defend themselves they were able going to be able to go into the witness box and make such excuses to austerity and they played along they were prepared to play this adversary system in the hope of being acquitted as three of them in the end war so that was another difference from today when prisoners all too often sit truculantly in the cells and refuse to have any part or like melosevic play to and carriage to play to the gallery and refuse to play fairly the third reason why nuremberg succeeded was the enormous public hostility to the nazis by the time the trial had ended in fact the three who were acquitted could not be released for two weeks because of the determination of the german people to revenge and to hang them so they had to be guarded but it was the one of the legacies of nuremberg to provide the basis for the human rights commission headed by elinor Roosevelt to draft the universal declaration of human rights and it was in 1948 that we get that great really a triangle of human rights institute institutions the universal declaration the genocide convention and the Geneva conventions coming a couple of months later and of course they spawn all sorts of good conventions we get over the next years we get the conventions against racism and apartheid we get conventions for the rights of children and conventions against torture and so on and I there was someone said surveying the killing fields of Rwanda years later the road to hell is paved with good conventions because they they had absolutely no enforcement mechanism attached there was under the genocide convention a duty imposed on states to intervene but otherwise there was no enforcement there was no court no police force and so you get the sort of joke that I encountered in Sarajevo in the early 90s what you do to a man who murders another man you send him to prison for life what you do to a man who murders 20 other people you send them to a mental asylum until they're cured what you do to a man who kills 200,000 you send him to Geneva for peace negotiations and that of course was a joke about Milosevic and it got rather blacker as here in Europe it was impossible to stop the killing and it was very much as a fig leaf for its failure that the UN in 1994 set up the ICT why the court to punish former Yugoslav Milosevic the Croatians and so forth and then that played so well and seemed to work the tell you the intercepts from from the Bosnian Serbs suggest that they were actually worried about indictment by this new court they set up another for Rwanda the ICT and then but of course nothing happened for years because NATO said it wasn't worth risking the life of one NATO soldier to arrest any significant figure and it took Madeleine Albright and Robin Cook to insist that arrests be undertaken and towards the end of the 90s we get some of the concentration camp competence and then we get the generals and then finally we get Milosevic and now Karadith and Malarych and of course at the end of the century we had the Pinochet case which riveted the world's attention on the possibility of ending impunity on the possibility of international justice general Pinochet uh some of you younger people may not remember came to Britain uh to take tea with mrs Thatcher um actually it was whiskey and uh he was placed under house arrest even though it was a form of mansion arrest uh for 18 months and Jack Straw perhaps the greatest thing he ever did was to withstand so much pressure he got pressure from the pope he got pressure from the pope in waiting he got pressure from the americans from the latin americans he even got pressure from Fidel Castro his sworn enemy of Pinochet who said that the detention was an insult to latin american heads of state but it was the end it was a breach of the westphalian principles to detain the head of another former head of a friendly state for deportation to spain to be taken of course he beat the rap by claiming illness but meanwhile the courts international courts went what seemed to be a very effective way the icc had been agreed at the rome treaty in 1998 uh it was thought it would take years decades before 60 states signed up in fact they were all 60 states signed up by 2002 and that's when its jurisdiction began begins uh today there are 123 states which have ratified the international criminal court treaty um although that doesn't include america for historical reasons the later the obama administration has been virtually an associate member but the trials themselves have turned out uh in have had some difficulties they're very long it's remarkable to think back that nuremberg was one year the prosecution case against milosevic alone took three years uh the length of time has really been appalling uh they've become very expensive uh just as they take an enormous length of time uh they take uh extremely uh they are extremely costly and uh so it was hoped that these were teething problems that international justice would would uh quicken that it would become less expensive that it would become more effective uh it seemed those hopes seemed to be justified the icty dealt effectively with about 160 serve Croatian and uh Albanian defendants and uh most of them were convicted in sense to prison they can't be uh given the death penalty the Rwandan court seemed to be working the icc uh while it took until 2012 before it had its first conviction for running child soldiers uh was at least underway and with the resolutions resolution 1971 in 2011 asking the icc prosecutor to investigate the situation in Libya and resolution 1973 which required or asked or invited NATO to take I quote all necessary means to protect the citizens of Benghazi against the Gaddafi assault on them uh it seemed that we were getting to a stage where uh the responsibility to protect was uh coming true however as we know Libya has come apart and currently refuses to surrender Gaddafi this is partly because whichever government and there've been several and it's not clear at the moment which government is in power uh want to string him up from a lamppost as that's uh it seems clear that uh they want both him and Al Sinusi to die um but in any event the government can't surrender him because he's being held by a militia in Zintan then there has been the failure to arrest Bashir which has been all the more embarrassing because a number of African countries have welcomed him hailed him as a great figure and refused their duty to arrest him even though uh some of them have ratified the icc treaty and when um ensuda the prosecutor went before the UN last October she said look I just can't uh bother because states are not upholding their duty under the treaty I can't be use my resources to maintain the evidence collection in relation to Darfur I'm going to use my resources on other cases and in effect give up on Bashir and then of course just recently we've had the disasters in relation to Kenyatta and Ruto I was very doubtful as to whether that case was appropriate for the ICC because the idea of the ICC is as a court of last resort it's only when you cannot prosecute in a local court and preferably as a result of an international war that you should resort to the ICC but what happened in Kenya was that although the riots and about a thousand people died in the course of an election violence which was fermented there was strong evidence at the time by Kenyatta and Ruto who were leading opposing parties um it was nonetheless obviously a case for local courts Kenya has many judges and many courts and an able DPP but of course the problem was that they wouldn't prosecute and after a special court which had been recommended by parliament the government refused to set up the matter was sent to the ICC and the ICC prosecutor just thought she had the evidence to begin with but witnesses were intimidated witness one witness was killed there was the government of Kenya would not allow her access to necessary documents and at the end of the day she could not continue so and and we look around and and there we see the killings in Nigeria in Libya in Iraq and in Syria and still no action and the security council refusing to take even to send the case of Assad to the ICC prosecutor so is international justice with all the hopes that had been raised in amnesty human rights watch all human rights NGOs had supported it and urged it and promoted it is it must we say to any surviving anti Assad protesters in the early days of 2011 was it all an illusion is it really the case that international justice is only possible when it's in the interests of powerful states is it the case that real politic will intervene it's pretty clear that Ruto and Kenyatta got off the hook when it was necessary for them to deal with Al-Shabaab violence and killings the the killings in the mall that was the point at which the powerful states in the international community said okay well if you're ahead of state you shouldn't you should go and deal with those atrocities and not sit in a dock in the hang that that is the african union position no head of state should be indicted which of course will encourage heads of state to remain heads of state for as long as they can china will always shield north Korea no matter what happens Ukraine there's been no accountability for russia's breach of international law so that is if you like the pessimistic position that we seem to have arrived at only three years after uh things seemed to be so bright but there is another view another story because particularly when you see how recent international justice the idea of international justice had been duremberg was a precedent that went into the deep freeze uh during the cold war was only picked up as almost an advertising gambit by the un in 1994 and has uh in the last 10 or 15 years created principles created precedents and created institutions that are up and running and may yet deliver 123 states have ratified there have been extraordinary developments in that have been inspired by international justice in latin america there've been trials in argentina and chili in guatemalo for genocide of rios mont um his hissan habre is finally and thanks to the african union on trial in senegal for those crimes against humanity the mass torture and murder that he committed when he was dictator of chad all those years ago there is an african court of human rights which is now going to be accorded some form of international jurisdiction although we have to wait and see that the human rights council has been far more effective than its predecessor the human rights commission it has brought in the very very powerful report on north korea by michael kerby it a very good report on srilanka on the killings of 40 to 70 000 tamel citizens at the end of the war it has a team that is collecting evidence on syria in case share or some of his generals become available there is i think we can say this a much greater human rights consciousness 40 national truth commissions have been set up there is in so many countries a documenting of crimes preserving of evidence the development of citizen journalists contributing so bearing all that in mind i don't think it's time yet to despair and the true test may be coming up and that is of course the test that has been finally finally the the glove was thrown down by the palestinian authority when against enormous pressure from from america and shamefully from britain they have signed up to the international criminal court and the investigation started on january the 16th and it's not africa so the african union is supportive it is a it it will be a true test because given the kind of crimes that were committed one has to say last year in that in gaza by both sides the shooting of rockets that were killing civilians the tunnels that were on the israeli side the killing of 2000 people enormously disproportionate many of them women and children there are certainly war crimes on both sides to investigate there are indictments to be handed down it is it will be i think the ultimate test of the icc and we'll see whether it passes it i think whether it does may depend on whether it gives in to the pressure that it's currently being subjected to because israel's response to the prosecutor opening an investigation was to immediately freeze the palestinian authorities tax revenues about 120 million dollars a month which comprises two-thirds of the palestinian authority budget israel collects it on the palestinians behalf and is supposed to pass it on and this will effectively bankrupt the palestinian authority and it's also lobbying congress in the states to withhold the 400 million that it gives to the palestinian authority each year now that seems to me to be utterly wrong and if america succumbs to mr neton yw's current visit and current request for that money be withheld that will show that will be a terrible blur to international justice it will underline the pessimistic view that it is really becoming all that is left is when it suits the um when it suits the great powers it doesn't suit them to have an independent and impartial investigation or prosecutions in relation to gaza but given what we saw of gaza last year given the deaths on both sides the behavior on both sides it may just be that this is a situation made for international justice so there i think we've got to leave the struggle for international justice perhaps with the comforting thought that it has not gone on for very long uh there was that millennium shift in 2000 away from west failure um and reached its height in 2011 with the adoption of the responsibility to protect now shifting back to real politic but the world is now more aware i think of the human rights principles and precedents and i think i'll offer this as as a final and rather gloomy thought that the real danger is that justice will be replaced in so many eyes and by so many nations with its real opponent which is lynch law no one talks of putting isis leaders on trial we just want to bomb them and kill after we've dealt with the taliban by killing its leaders on drone strikes bangladesh you can pick up my report free greatest and for nothing uh as you leave on the bangladesh international crimes tribunal which is ordering 90 year olds to go to the gallows who just happen to be leaders of the two opposition parties where thousands of people demonstrate uh for their execution in libyr the real reason why it's holding on to young godafi is that they want to string him up uh we is the world accepting and adopting this idea that we can replace the justice of the trial by decapitating suspects because that is what in so many places we are doing and the great thing in a way about international justice is that he doesn't accept the death penalty and this is very difficult to explain particularly to americans i was i was one of the british team to consider with the americans what to do about saddam hussein how to put him on trial what punishment he should have and the americans were plumping for the death penalty uh we said no life imprisonment um what life imprisonment where oh finland where they're all going finland he'll have 120 television channels most of them showing pornography he'll he'll his wives will be allowed to visit him uh and so on so i actually suggested that uh we should do to him what we did to napoleon and put him on saint helana and to my surprise the foreign office took this idea seriously and uh inquired of the saint helanans whether this would be whether they would like saddam hussein and they said well we're trying to develop a tourist industry down here and we think not so in the end he went to his obscene the videodend on that camera recorder that you may have seen as he was strung up so it's not easy but i leave you with the gloomy thought that we may be at least for a while on all sides thinking that the penalty should be death and indeed death without trial thank you for that illuminating lecture um jeffrey's agreed to take questions from the audience i've been told i've to warn you that you will be videoed so you will be videoed just for posterity no other reason um we do have a microphone here so there's a hand here there's another hand there thank you for an excellent lecture by create two questions first one is there's a major amount of the war going on at the moment is non-state actors how can we have international law when one group can actually be almost excused from the powers of the law while state actors are are covered by it and the second everywhere every time there's war reporting there's always this proportionality issue especially with israel where proportion okay 76 israelis died 2000 palestinians died but nobody's actually sat down and worked out what the proportion normally in war is how many civilians to uh combatants and the amount of weaponry that israel invested in Gaza they could have wiped Gaza off the map in days but 2000 people died don't you think the word proportionality is well past the sol by date i couldn't agree more proportionality is a lawyer's word and lawyers know what it means it means what the what courts choose it to mean it's it's a european word that comes to us and i don't think it makes any sense to anything to anyone in the british tradition it seems to me to be entirely subjective and quite wrong to have for example as a basis for criminal liability i think you can say that 76 soldiers dying compared to 2000 many of them civilians women and children is disproportionate and that in itself is the basis for an investigation to see whether for example rockets were shot towards churches in Gaza knowing that women and children were hiding were seeking refuge there because so that could be used as a trigger for a war crime but i don't think that it should be used in any other way other than as the basis for an argument certainly not as incorporated into some sort of law um i do think i don't think however that the problem of non-state actors is as great as people make out uh the pirates were non-state actors and we have a basis for i mean it seems to me isis although it pretends to be a state in the form of a caliphate uh and Boko Haram and so on uh committing genocide isis is killing coptic christians because they're christians it's killing y zedi y zedi's whatever they are they're um they have a religion and they're being killed for it so um i don't think there is any difficulty uh in prosecuting non-state actors for genocide and uh so i don't think that is a problem i mean the lord's resistance army is a non-state actor and we've managed to indict them even if we haven't captured Joseph Coney we've captured his one of his lieutenants but as i say i don't think the non-state actors are a problem other than to catch them and uh proportionality is a word that i wish i'd never heard of thank you the chaffer the bank do you see putin being indicted anytime in the future well look i when i was president of the theory leon war crimes court people said well you'll never get charles taylor uh initially he was the uh president of liberia then he went protected by politicians protected by a lot of money to nigeria but when his friendship sprayed and his money ran out um he was handed over so who knows what the future holds i mean uh at the end of the day these people it's quite interesting if you as arguing um the case for the invalidation of amnesty's in international law and and this came up there is a country that offers refuge uh and that is Saudi Arabia who somehow think it's uh it's within their principles of their charity to give refuge to every mass murdering head of state to ask for it they gave refuge to to to um idi amyn and two of his wives they gave refuge to ben ali who's there at the moment uh although the genizians want him they gave refuge to the head of ymen so uh it may be that if Assad falls that's where he'll go uh and it will be but it may be one day Saudi Arabia will uh join the rest of the world in handing these people over as Nigeria did you you just don't know and Putin could fall and fall heavily and uh might be prosecuted himself in Russia for sending uh so many uh young Russians in to some of them to be killed in Ukraine who knows i mean there are uh as if you read um the recent book that came out on Sir Guy Magnitsky it will expose a great deal of financially corrupt connections that Mr Putin is alleged to have and it may be that that will be his undoing in relation to um his years to come in a Russia that wants to get some of its money back and uh so it it's difficult to say never but of course at the moment he's there preventing any proper investigation let alone any prosecution of those who colluded in shooting down the Malaysian airliner this lady here i'm um Geetha Sago from the center for secular space um i'm also the producer of a film that's more than 20 years old called the war crimes file which investigated killings in Bangladesh in 1971 and i think that given the questions that have been raised as a result of your excellent talk about non-state actors not facing justice about the fact that international tribunals are intended to be tribunals of last resort not substitute for national tribunals i think it is a tragedy given your reputation that you dismiss the tribunal as simply trying people because they're leaders of the opposition parties they are being tried because and i know this because i investigated those those some of those people who were indicted myself and i wasn't dependent on hearsay i was in you know we found witness eyewitness evidence uh because they were leaders of death squads and so on at the time i have to say i'm against the death penalty i've said so in many speeches to the young people who you mentioned who are were calling for the death penalty um but i do think that that Bangladesh has a right to a national process using ideas of international law which it itself helped to develop um and i think that's a different thing from criticising uh the procedural aspects of the trial many of which are deeply flawed uh mixing up the two becomes an uh and uh sort of becomes an argument for genocide denial and i think it's a tragedy every member of the british bar who's commented on the international crimes tribunal in Bangladesh has commented only from the point of view of the defendants of the trial and not from the point of view of international justice more broadly well i'm very glad you said that because i've got several hundred copies of my report uh which came out last week on the Bangladesh tribunal and you can pick it up and read it for yourself the first half of the report explains the appalling what i consider to be one of the worst genocides committed by the pakistani army in 1971 operation searchlight where they went in back by kisindir and nixon and british and and british and american weapons and they committed genocide they committed genocide against the hindu community they committed genocide uh without any doubt and uh it was only thanks to india and to the mukti bahani the the freedom fighters that eventually uh at the end of that year that they won that particular war and they it didn't stop one of the i think the most disgusting uh events when it was quite clear that bangladesh was going to come into being as a new nation a few days before the end of the war uh it was perhaps some of these people it was the pakistani army who had the death list but it was no doubt the razikas and and some of the people who may now be facing in be indicted and even sentenced to death by this court uh came and they killed every teacher every politician every community leader every writer every artist they could lay their hands on so as to destroy the chance of uh the leaders this new nation uh getting up and uh i explain that and i do argue that it was utterly right to set up this court and i believe it should be in fact uh that the problem is that there are many of the pakistani perpetrators 195 of them were identified at the time who are still alive and i believe the security council should take over the court and indict uh those pakistani soldiers who were in part responsible uh but i do not accept that these people although they may be guilty and i make no claim that they are innocent i specifically uh withhold any thought uh or any suggestion that they might be innocent but i do not believe that they should almost all be sentenced to death because of the way the um bengladesh supreme court has interpreted uh the law as requires almost mandatory uh death sentence anyway um we can talk about uh about that later but i do if you are interested in this particular experiment with international justice uh by all means read my report i've even suggested because the man who was really responsible became buto's defense minister and after after they put buto to death he became uh he's he's was given a state funeral in the end uh i think uh there is an argument and an interesting argument for actually not just trials in absentia but posthumous trials where the evidence is still around where the evidence is overwhelming and where the individual has been wrongly honoured by his own country but anyway it's that's one of the uh perhaps provocative ideas that i uh suggest in this report which does uh seek to uh support the idea of retribution for that hideous crime of 1971 but doubts whether uh sentencing people to death who happen to be opposition leaders like it or not uh is uh is the way forward time for just a couple more questions trap at the back thank you very much for your excellent uh speech um my question relates to whether or not we need to have a bit more realism about international criminal justice and i say this specifically in the context of two cases one that's finished uh the prosecutor versus kenyata and another which you mentioned is upcoming uh that of the case of israel palestine i'm sorry sorry which is the upcoming case uh the investigation into the recent conflict in gaza right if we look at the case of the prosecutor first in kenyata we can take the line of the prosecutor that you have erried here earlier um that a result to do with the interference of witnesses i think the evidence is much stronger to suggest that the investigation and the prosecution uh by the office of the prosecutor was um wholly insufficient um almost embarrassingly bad um and a failure to to to follow the duty of the rome statute um and i think that is why charges were dropped um because if there had been sufficient evidence if there had been a sufficient investigation surely we would have now been in the trial stage so given that uh inadequate uh ineffective and an almost amateuristic approach shouldn't we call upon the office of the prosecutor and all who care about international criminal justice to turn it around because if we have that type of amateurism applied in an investigation of israeli generals and politicians surely we will see another dropping of cases and we will we will see the impunity that uh israel has had in their crimes and gana continued and legitimised by the international criminal justice uh thereby undermining the entire uh project of international criminal justice i agree i actually i'm very critical of the prosecutor and i'm waiting for a book by lionel nickels which is coming out shortly uh on the whole kenyata ruta process to see just whether that concern is justified there is a view that the prosecutor should not have taken it in the first place and was under some pressure to do so and should have been absolutely strict on the complementarity principle and uh there were courts in kenyata that should have dealt with it however that wasn't the case and i don't i wouldn't rush to judgment uh on this prosecutor there have been a number of criticisms of her predecessor for being more keen to getting on the act and to satisfy journalists than to actually do the hard work and set up um but you've got to be aware that a court without a country a court without a police system a court without access in many cases to the evidence is going to have difficulties that our four investigation was incredibly difficult because they were denied access they were suffered all sorts of problems so one shouldn't be too quick to um judge but it will certainly um it is something that the kenyata case will be mulled over and and the books coming out will enable i think uh hopefully um constructive criticism and better prosecution uh services but we should be aware of the difficulties and sometimes dangers that we're putting people in my name is mistasia i'm a third year law student at sats thank you very much for your interesting lecture i have two questions for you um the first relates to increasing the legitimacy of international justice um i interned on the courageage case last summer and one thing that struck me was that on the second day of the closing arguments the gallery was almost empty so it seemed as if the press had also gotten sick of the case by that time um when i went to Sarajevo speaking with people on the ground i noticed that they were also um very disdainful of the icty itself because they felt that if the UN really wanted to do something for them they should have done it or could have done so earlier so my question is if um the purpose of international law is not just to combat immunity impunity but also to provide victims war crimes justice to war crimes victims how can we achieve that for better achieve that and the second question relates to the definition of genocide one of the things i've noticed is that there is no legal requirement of a plan or state policy although the ictr and icty jurisprudence suggests that it can be useful in discovering perpetrator's special intent but i think if the purpose of the genocide convention is to protect groups then the theory of a lone genocide there would um seem to seem to be quite counterintuitive so how do you think we can improve the definition of genocide in that respect i think that's a fascinating question on genocide uh as for your first question i'll come back to it as for your first question on keriditch i'm interested that the press has lost interest um but you know international criminal justice began by almost pandering to the media it needed to actually strut it stuff out there it needed to persuade people that this was a possibility and i think it did that rather well in the end then it had to provide fair trials and that was a real problem because the judges bent over backwards to help the defendants um you have melosevic for example got three qcs to assist him even though he pretended he didn't want any he had a whole pile of lawyers in the gallery but because but he wanted to play the media as well he wanted to be a standalone figure to which would suit the serbian idea of their up against the wall and uh so he insisted on being pictured alone without a lawyer and defending himself even though as i say he had all his lawyers in the gallery out of the camera shot so there are these games that are played and uh while there is no doubt that meladich bears prime responsibility for the massacre at sorry at at Srebrenica the case of keriditch is more interesting and and not so straightforward and it's a pity that it's gone off the boil but no doubt books will be written on it once the judgment comes in after the inevitable appeal genocide is a real lawyers debate at the moment because we have this problem of proving genocidal intent and there was a a view that went around some years ago that you needed to be able to prove a direction to kill and you couldn't you can't even do that with the holocaust if you look at the evidence for the planning of the holocaust it's basically adolf eichman's vans a conference minutes which talks of relocating jews to the east and talks of helping them talks of their abandoned property and so on it is a document which is elliptical and and most you very rarely find documents like the knight and fog decrees with going signature on them as far as the extermination of the jews so we don't look now for orders we don't look for plans but we draw inferences of the specific intent that is required for genocide and there is a lot of debate about whether we really do need the crime of genocide whether we simply can't get away with charging crime against humanity since genocide is simply the worst crime against humanity but if you go back to the theorist to Raphael Lemkin and others and the genocide scholars do believe that genocide is a crime of its own because there are such a nationalism the dehumanizing of racial and religious minorities and their extermination that does make it worth keeping genocide as a crime the practical reason of course for keeping genocide as a crime is that the genocide convention requires action the use of the g word which turkey so avoids which britain and the united states so disgracefully and disgustingly avoided in 1996 when the tootsies were being hacked to death does require action and that it is a particularly useful convention because it's one of the few that the united states has ratified and the ratification was quite an extraordinary thing because it happened in 1986 and it was partly due to a young obese bearded protester from Flint michigan who heard that Ronald Reagan as president was visiting bitburg cemetery which had ss graves so he jumped on a plane with a friend and they made banners uh Reagan honors the ss and held it there as Reagan visited the cemetery and the the news went around the world the pictures of them holding their banners up uh infuriated the jewish lobby in america which got into action and three weeks after his return Ronald Reagan ratified the genocide convention and the young obese bearded protester from Flint michigan was of course michael more making his making his first and i think still most effective protest right the wine is uncourt but i've promised three more questions um there's someone at the back with the microphone there yes um yeah i actually i wanted to ask something about Sudan so um anyone that follows Sudanese politics knows that in the east of Sudan the blue Nile area is completely on fire in the west obviously we have Darfur um in the south there's a civil violence maybe leading to civil war so Senso Campo has given up on Sudan how can we believe in international justice as more than a concept when it really hasn't done anything for us on the ground and my second question even though i know the answer is quite obvious but i'd still love to hear what you have to say do you think bush and blair will ever be indicted for war crimes committed during the war on terror i'm sorry you'll have to repeat at least the second question because i couldn't hear from all the movement do you think bush and blair will ever be indicted for war crimes committed during the war on terror who should be indicted bush and blair and his best friend bush and blair oh bush and blair oh there's two yes you want to answer that one no i'll just hear oh okay these last comments for your lecture i have two questions the first one what do you think about the maybe march mara affairs and the ripost of the prosecutor on this matter which matter the maybe marma the south of the on the flotilla directed to gaza oh the flotilla yeah okay and the second question is what do you think about the icj attitude about xenocide also in the light of the recent decision in crecia ever against the sarbia thank you and lastly which will be one question i hope it's on yeah uh i'm sympathetic with the americans on capital punishment though i might want to include some american presidents in the dock but if we can't have capital punishment rather than freeboard lodging color tv uh lovely gyms and conjugal visits could we not at least have hard labor okay well the flotilla to gaza uh was a a terrible incident it was a one-off and it's difficult for international justice to get at one offs because the crime against humanity definition requires widespread and systematic crimes and a one-off event isn't you can maybe get one off genocide because you have if you have a large group that is destroyed that was the case with srebrenica but uh the flotilla is difficult to bring in as to the icj decision on crecia and sarbia i thought it was rather a hand washing exercise they didn't want to bring in a judgment to favor either side and so they rather turned their back on the evidence and said that we can't have we can't infer genocidal intent it is true and i mean this is what they did it was make the distinction that courts have made before but between ethnic cleansing and genocide uh it is not necessarily genocide to embark upon ethnic cleansing but the genocide convention largely because of the armenian case which involved both deportation of entire racial group and the seizure of their property but deportation across hundreds of miles of desert without food without medicine and ending up in concentration camps where typhus was was running and and so half a little over half the armenian race was exterminated uh that brought into the the genocide convention uh the phrase i just i'm trying to remember it is um genocide is committed by um creating conditions of life that cannot be sustained because of racial and religious reasons so subjecting a race or a religion to unsustainable conditions of life such as sending them on death marches uh would amount to genocide but ethnic cleansing of the kind that melosevic did to the armenians in just in fact setting along the road is not a genocide as such so um bush and Blair well we are getting a crime of aggression uh of which they're guilty but we're not getting it to 2017 and it's not going to be backdated to 2003 so i fear that bush and Blair will probably evade uh capture and they won't be in the dock anytime soon although i have to say that ex-president bush is uh has been very careful in his travel plans not to enter any european country that might uh uh be persuaded to indict him under a universal jurisdiction theory uh but uh i think mr Blair will be safe in kazakhstan and uh other of his clients and certainly safe in israel um the uh bring back hard labour well that is one possibility i think i prefer all told to send them all to the forklans where they can be there'd be one use of the forbland islands they can uh commune with penguins and never be heard up again