DOC East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" (Deckle Edge) by Philippe Sands in History

Review

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful. Face to Face with Race and Mass Murderers.By Joseph PsotkaPhilippe Sands; QC (born 17 October 1960) was a lawyer at Matrix Chambers and Professor of Laws and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London. A specialist in international law; he appeared as counsel and advocate before many international courts and tribunals. He has written this very informative book on the origins of two powerful concepts in international law; “genocide and crimes against humanity” as an intertwining of his personal family history in the city of Lviv/Lwow/Lemberg around the time of the Nazi General Gouvernement ruled by Hans Frank. The denouement of his history occurs in Nuremburg/Nürnberg at the famous trials of the leading Nazis; where both “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” first entered the judicial record. His family history wove around the lives of the creators of these concepts; Hersh Lemkin and Rafael Lauterpacht; both internationally recognized experts in international law who have still left a powerful influence. Sands provides a brief and unsatisfying personal view of their concepts at the end.This review focuses on his presentation of these two key concepts in international law; which is as tortured and intertwined as his family history. Quotations from the book are in boldface. He begins his history with Lauterpacht’s first involvement with the “Constitutional Court; bringing Lauterpacht into direct contact with a new idea; in Europe if not America: individuals had inalienable constitutional rights; and they could go to a court to enforce those rights. This was a different model from that which protected minority rights; as in Poland…. His thesis—to use general principles of national law to strengthen international obligations—was published in May 1927; to great scholarly acclaim.” Sands was a student of Lauterpacht’s and so might be expected to be biased in his favor over Lemkin; but he shows an admirable even handedness in his exposition of both men’s ideas.Rafael Lemkin presented his main ideas in a volume titled “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe; the work adopted a different approach from Lauterpacht’s; with the aim of protecting groups; for which he invented a word for a new crime; “genocide;” the destruction of groups. Lauterpacht wrote a review of Lemkin’s book for The Cambridge Law Journal; hinting that he wasn’t a great supporter of Lemkin’s ideas…. The review was skeptical about the new term and its practical utility. The implication was clear: Lauterpacht was concerned that the protection of groups would undermine the protection of individuals.”Once the Nuremberg trials began; both men became involved although they apparently never met directly there. Lauterpacht was singularly influential in getting the charges to “refer to the atrocities against individual civilians as “Crimes Against Humanity” … A version of the formulation had been used in 1915; when the British and the Americans decried Turkish actions against Armenians; … By Article 6(c) of the charter; the tribunal’s judges were given power to punish individuals who had committed crimes against humanity; defined to cover murder; extermination; enslavement; deportation; and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population”.Lemkin’s analysis of the Holocaust made him a valuable member of the American legal team. “Lemkin followed the trail; the “decisive steps” that formed a pattern. The first step was usually the act of denationalization; making individuals stateless by severing the link of nationality between Jews and the state; so as to limit the protection of the law. This was followed by “dehumanization;” removing legal rights from members of the targeted group. The two-step pattern was applied across Europe. The third step was to kill the nation “in a spiritual and cultural sense”. “His focus was mainly on the treatment of “Jews; Poles; Slovenes and Russians;” but of at least one group—homosexuals—Lemkin made no mention. He wrote of the misdemeanors of the “Germans;” rather than the Nazis” making but one reference to the National Socialists; and “argued that “the German people” had “accepted freely” what was planned; participating voluntarily in the measures and profiting greatly from their implementation. The desire to protect groups did not prevent him from singling out the Germans as a group.”In Chapter 9 Lemkin discarded “barbarity” and “vandalism” and “created a new word; an amalgam of the Greek word genos (tribe or race) and the Latin word cide (killing)… Genocide concerned acts “directed against individuals; not in their individual capacity; but as members of national groups;”... “New conceptions require new terms.” … “he’d made a proposal to the Polish government in exile in London; using the Polish word ludobójstwo; a literal translation of the German word Völkermord (murder of the peoples)”. Notice; please; that the phrase “the peoples” implies a racist view of the world that there are more than one kind of humanity; an idea implicit in the Nazis’ racism as well. Lemkin basically adopted the Nazis’ racist terminology (Voelkermord/ racial killing) and turned it against them. Lemkin fell into the simplistic conceptual error of adopting his opponents’ perspectives and in this event; continuing a “tirade against Germans with the claim that the terrible acts reflected a “militarism born of the innate viciousness of the German racial character.”... “his attack should have been on the Nazis; not the Germans. … Lemkin had fallen into a trap; adopting “biological thinking” of the kind that led to anti-Semitism and anti-Germanism.” More simply put; Lemkin’s perspective was racist. In this he agreed almost completely with the purely Nazi sentiment of a focus on a racial community in Hans Frank’s defense statement during the trial that “A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.” Lemkin edited his book in which “He also wrote a new section; to make the point that the “German people” were a “Kain who killed Abel”.“Genocide having been left out of the Nuremberg Charter; Lemkin knew that the crimes listed in Article 6 still had to be elaborated into specific charges against the defendants.On October 6; the Four Powers reached agreement on an indictment that contained four counts; the last of which was crimes against humanity. Yet genocide wasn’t introduced under this head; as Lemkin had hoped; but in count 3; on war crimes. … Genocide was extermination of racial and religious groups; against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national; racial; or religious groups; particularly Jews; Poles; Gypsies and others. … October 18; Lemkin was back in the United States; exhausted but satisfied. “I went to London and succeeded in having inscribed the charge of Genocide against the Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg;” he later wrote. “I included genocide in the indictment at the Nuremberg trials.”… Crimes against humanity and genocide were both in the trial.”Strangely; the word ‘genocide’ after all Lemkin’s efforts did not appear in the trial proceedings themselves until the Nazis themselves helped Lemkin. “Help came from an unlikely source; Alfred Rosenberg. I am no génocidaire; Frank’s neighbor on the defendants’ front bench told the judges; speaking through his lawyer.” Given the racist views implicit in the concept of genocide; it should not have been surprising that it was the Nazis to whom its meaning appealed most directly. However; the Nazis were not the only racists at the trial; since a racist view of humanity was the prevailing common sense view of the time; (and sadly remains so today). As the lead American prosecutor pointed out “Remember Frank’s words; Jackson told the judges; that “a thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will still not be erased.”The British prosecutor; Shawcross; used the word as well; although his main advisor; Lauterpacht; had not included it in his draft. “Shawcross used the term in a more limited sense; as he made clear. “Genocide” was an aggravated “crime against humanity;” but only if committed in connection with the war.” Also; given Lauterpacht’s less racist perspective Shawcross addressed broader; less racist groups; such as the Polish intelligentsia and “Genocide” pursued “in different forms” against other groups; in Yugoslavia; in Alsace-Lorraine; in the Low Countries; even in Norway”.“Crimes against humanity got a central place in the judgment and; for the first time in history; were recognized to be an established part of international law.” Yet; the final judgement did not use the word ‘genocide’. “Several of the others were found to have committed crimes against humanity; but none were found guilty of genocide. The word was unspoken.”And yet the concept of genocide also entered international law with great force largely through the indefatigable efforts of Rafael Lemkin at the trial and beyond. “He argued against general declarations about human rights of the kind that would be raised at the first General Assembly of the United Nations; to be held later that year. How could piracy and forgery be international crimes; he asked rhetorically; but not the extermination of millions? He made a pitch for genocide to be “declared an international crime;” reminding those in the room about Axis Rule. Anyone involved in “the criminal philosophy of genocide” should be treated as a criminal; he told those present.”“Desiring to lay the path for an international bill of rights; the General Assembly affirmed that the principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal—including crimes against humanity—were a part of international law. By resolution 95; the General Assembly endorsed Lauterpacht’s ideas and decided to find a place for the individual in the new international order…The General Assembly then adopted resolution 96. This went beyond what the judges at Nuremberg had decided: noting that genocide denied the “right of existence of entire human groups;” the Assembly decided to override the ruling and affirm that “genocide is a crime under international law.” Where judges feared to tread; governments legislated into existence a rule to reflect Lemkin’s work…On December 9; 1948; the General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; the first human rights treaty of the modern era.” (also institutionalizing the racist misconceptions implicit in the concept of genocide .)“No treaty on crimes against humanity has yet been adopted to parallel Lemkin’s Genocide Convention.”Sands wraps up his commentary comparing genocide and crimes against humanity with a brief history. “Two months after agreement was reached on the ICC; in September 1998 Jean-Paul Akayesu became the first person ever to be convicted for the crime of genocide by an international court. This followed a trial held at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda…A few weeks later; in November 1998; the House of Lords in London ruled that Senator Augusto Pinochet; former president of Chile; was not entitled to claim immunity from the jurisdiction of the English courts because the acts of torture for which he was said to be responsible were a crime against humanity. This was the first time any national court had ever handed down such a ruling…In May 1999; the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević became the first serving head of state to be indicted for crimes against humanity; for alleged acts in Kosovo. In November 2001; after he left office; genocide charges were added to his indictment; in relation to atrocities in Bosnia; at Srebrenica…In September 2007; the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Serbia violated its obligation to Bosnia and Herzegovina by failing to prevent a genocide in Srebrenica. This was the first occasion on which any state had been condemned by an international court for violating the Genocide Convention…Two years later; in May 2012; Charles Taylor became the first head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to fifty years in prison…In 2015; the United Nations International Law Commission started to work actively on the subject of crimes against humanity; opening the way to a possible companion to the convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide…”Sadly; it currently contains an article continuing the Genocide Convention’s racist view of atrocities against racial groups. And sadly too; it ignores lgbt issues and defines gender bias as only against a man or a woman.“An informal hierarchy has emerged. In the years after the Nuremberg judgment; the word genocide gained traction in political circles and in public discussion as the “crime of crimes;” elevating the protection of groups above that of individuals...a crime against humanity came to be seen as the lesser evil…Proving the crime of genocide is difficult; and in litigating cases I have seen for myself how the need to prove the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part; as the Genocide Convention requires; can have unhappy psychological consequences … enhances the sense of solidarity among the members of the victim group while reinforcing negative feelings toward the perpetrator group…The term “genocide;” with its focus on the group; tends to heighten a sense of “them” and “us;” burnishes feelings of group identity; and may unwittingly give rise to the very conditions that it seeks to address: by pitting one group against another; it makes reconciliation less likely…I fear that the crime of genocide has distorted the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity; because the desire to be labeled a victim of genocide brings pressure on prosecutors to indict for that crime. For some; to be labeled a victim of genocide becomes “an essential component of national identity” without contributing to the resolution of historical disputes or making mass killings less frequent. It was no surprise that an editorial in a leading newspaper; on the occasion of the centenary of Turkish atrocities against Armenians; suggested that the word “genocide” may be unhelpful; because it “stirs up national outrage rather than the sort of ruthless examination of the record the country needs.”…Yet against these arguments; I am bound to accept that the sense of group identity is a fact. As long ago as 1893; the sociologist Louis Gumplowicz; in his book La lutte des races (The struggle between the races); noted that “the individual; when he comes into the world; is a member of a group.”… It seems that a basic element of human nature is that “people feel compelled to belong to groups and; having joined; consider them superior to competing groups.” This poses a serious challenge for our system of international law confronted with a tangible tension: on the one hand; people are killed because they happen to be members of a certain group; on the other; the recognition of that fact by the law tends to make more likely the possibility of conflict between groups; by reinforcing the sense of group identity. Perhaps Leopold Kohr got it right; in the strong but private letter he wrote to his friend Lemkin; that the crime of genocide will end up giving rise to the very conditions it seeks to ameliorate.”Sands thus ends his narrative with a very diluted and ambiguous terminus. It seems to me that his refusal to acknowledge the fundamental error in a racist view of humanity lies at the core of his inconsistency. In the end; he has to invoke the arguments of someone outside his binary world of Lauterpacht and Lemkin to reconcile his views: Kohr; with his arguments against viewing the Germans or anyone as a ‘race’ shows the direction for final clarification. Sands’ preference for a law based on individual guilt rather than group guilt can be strengthened by a recognition of the modern scientific view that all humanity shares more than 99.5% of the same genetic material; leaving no room for more than one race of humanity. This takes away the implicit racist power of the concept of genocide; with its racist notion that an entire evolutionary group could be forever wiped out in a crime of crimes against humanity. From this stance; other shortcomings of a genocidal view of groups help to eradicate the concept of genocide.The problem with protecting groups is that it opens up the punishment of groups; retaliation against collective guilt; and if that punishment is mortal; how to distinguish it from genocide itself. This is all too evident in the blame on ‘German’s rather than Nazi ideologues that arose in Lemkin’s writings; the Nuremburg trials; and the convictions. Lemkin's approach to genocide made the same mistake as Hitler's and the prevalent worldview of scholars of that era: assuming the reality of unique genetic human groups. If this fiction is recognized as unreal then the focus remains on crimes against humanity and individual rights; where it belongs.0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. An Intimate Story of Three Men who Changed Human Rights LawBy Michael GriswoldIn East West Street; the reader actually gets treated to three stories. One is the family story of Phillipe Sands who has relatives who survived the Holocaust; thus explaining why he wrote this book and the two men who developed the terms “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” East West Street is like reading a detective story of sorts because one is not exactly sure how the pieces of the three men fit together at points; but by the end they do fit. Having the patience to wait it out may be the hard part.The choppy vignette nature of some of the sections could make it difficult for certain readers to get truly invested in the story because the minute one gets engaged with one story; the story switches to another character and the process repeats itself. I had trouble with this aspect; but that is really up to the individual reader. To the positive; he made this book quite readable and intimate; which is far from a given with lawyer types. To Genocide scholars; I think he humanized Raphael Lemkin and others and left a better understanding of the humanness behind the convention that means so much.1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Review from Havok Journal.By krama00lA Review of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity by Philippe SandsEast West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity is the latest major work by the Franco-British academic Philippe Sands. East West Street explores the origins of the legal terms “genocide” and “crimes against humanity;” and how those terms made it in to the legal lexicon of international law at the close of World War II as the Allied governments grappled with the herculean task of trying to account for some of the most horrible crimes in the history of mankind.east-west-streetUnlike other works about atrocity crimes that tend to be overly legalistic and frankly pretentious; Sands engages this topic in a fresh; and at times deeply personal way. He focuses on a series of fascinating coincidences involving four individuals whose destinies were intertwined although none of them ever realized it.First; Sands explores the careers of two prolific international law scholars who rose to fame in the 1930s and 1940s. The Austrian-Polish law scholar Hersch Lauterpacht would be responsible for operationalizing and giving legal effect to the term “crimes against humanity” during the Nuremburg war crimes trials. The Belarusian scholar Raphael Lemkin would in turn invent and insert the term “genocide” into the same war crimes tribunal.If this sounds too technical or boring for most readers; have no fear. Sands presents both concepts in the context of the crimes committed by Adolph Hitler’s personal attorney Hans Frank; also known as Nuremberg Prisoner number seven; who incidentally was the military governor of the city in which both Lauterpacht and Lemkin studied law. So that the personal nature of the Holocaust is not lost in the mire of legal and historical writing; Sands provides another twist to the story. Sands’ own grandfather was from the same city where both Lauterpacht and Lemkin studied law; and the same one that Frank would rule with an iron fist; eventually exterminating every Jew in the city including the families of Lauterpacht and Lemkin; and Philipe Sands’ own grandfather.Despite the technical nature of this book; it remains highly readable even for readers with an non-legal background. At times; sections that focused on Sands’ family slightly distracted from main effort of the book; and the work could have been effectively separated into two separate books. Additionally; interjected throughout are tales of heroism and horror; and of incredible humanity counterbalanced by living nightmares. These sections are riveting in their own right; but do very little to illuminate the primary discussion about international criminal law; and often feel misplaced.East West Street brings up another recurring question about World War II. Why; in the twilight of 2016; do we continue to be fascinated by the Holocaust; and why do writers continue to produce works about the crimes committed by the Nazis? The atrocities committed by fascist Germany are well-documented. Almost all of the Nazi perpetrators from the Holocaust are now gone; so why write yet another book on the subject?The answer may be found in current events. On September 27; 1979; President Jimmy Carter at the presentation of the report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust said: “Out of our memory … of the Holocaust we must forge an unshakable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent; never again will the world…fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide … we must harness the outrage of our own memories to stamp out oppression wherever it exists.”Never again. Yet; since the Holocaust the world continues to fail to prevent genocides and other atrocity crimes including crimes against humanity. Since 1979; Serb forces have committed genocide in the former Yugoslavia; and the Rwandan civil war produced atrocities perpetrated by both sides including a genocide against the Tutsi by the Hutu majority. Horrible crimes have been committed in the Central African Republic; Sudan; South Sudan; and other places. Even as I write this; civilians are being slaughtered indiscriminately in Syria by the Asad regime; and Yezidi and Turkmen captives are experiencing nightmarish captivity by the so-called Islamic State. And yet nations fail to stop it.With East West Street; Philippe Sands reminds us; once again; why we continue to say “never again.” The Holocaust is that pesky reminder to the international community that it still gets it wrong. Unlike many failed responses to atrocities today; however; Sands also reminds us that once upon a time; lawyers in the governments of the free world did more than just talk; and government agencies produced more than just carefully scripted talking points that fool no one. They took action in the most decisive way and attempted to forge a new legal order out of the furnaces of World War II by creating a system where even the highest ranking members of oppressive governments cannot escape accountability for their actions.Despite its flaws; East West Street is extraordinarily provocative of thought; and evocative of our collective consciousness. It should be read by all those interested in post-conflict studies; the history of World War II; Holocaust studies; international law; or human rights.