Lawfare - Lawfare and Universal Jurisdiction

Lawfare and Universal Jurisdiction

Lawfare may involve the law of a nation turned against its own officials, but more recently it has been associated with the spread of universal jurisdiction, that is, one nation or an international organization hosted by that nation reaching out to seize and prosecute officials of another. Behind universal jurisdiction lies an Enlightenment view that all persons are endowed with basic human rights, and that infringing the rights of anyone no matter where they are violates internationally agreed principles of right and wrong.

Justice Robert H. Jackson speaking as a chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials famously stated that an international tribunal could punish acts by captured Nazi officials which may have been perfectly legal in Fascist Germany (indeed one charge was they distorted the law itself into an instrument of oppression), but went well beyond "what is tolerable by modern civilization." In the jargon of "Lawfare," the Nuremberg Trials might be described as a kind of universal jurisdiction lawfare against German officials following the actual warfare of World War II. Though the asymmetry in that case would be strong against weak since the Allies had defeated the Nazis, and the desired public relations victory the detailed exposure of Holocaust atrocities.