'Law not war' - Inspiring international criminal law champion Benjamin Ferencz (1920-2023) will be sorely missed | Asser Institute - 11 April 2023 |

Ferencz became well-known because of his role in Nuremberg after World War II. He was an investigator of Nazi war crimes and would become chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen trial.

Relentless efforts

With his work in Nuremberg, Benjamin Ferencz assisted in laying the foundation for the International Criminal Court (ICC). Ferencz: De "Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task. And I also learned that if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race."

Ferencz was also critical though: he was very disappointed that the United States did not become a state party to the Rome Statute of the ICC. Ferencz: "I have not forgotten that it took the United States forty years to ratify the Genocide Convention which we sponsored. But the world didn't wait for the United States. If the United States comes on board sooner, and I hope it will, and I expect that it will, so much the better. If they don't, the world will move ahead and the United States will remain behind and it will lose the leadership role which it has enjoyed for so many years."

Benjamin Ferencz repeatedly said George W. Bush and his administration should be tried for the Iraq War | The Intercept |

One thing worth remembering in this context are the famous opening remarks at Nuremberg by Robert H. Jackson, the chief justice:

If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. And we are not prepared to lay down the rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.

Sadly, by the end of Ferencz's life, he understood why Jackson's confidence was misplaced and might not be surprised by the glaring omissions in his obituaries. "No country that prefers to use its power rather than the rule of law will vote for the rule of law, it's logical," he said in a recent documentary. "There are some people who do not trust the rule of law, and they prefer to use military power to achieve their goals as they decide, when they decide. That's led by the United States. ... War will make mass murderers out of otherwise decent people. ... It's inevitable, whether they are Americans, or they're Germans, or anybody else."