History
"All nations," says the International Treatise published under the authority of Roman Emperor Justinian (c. 482-565) " . . .are governed partly by their own particular laws, and partly by those laws which are common to all, natural Reason appoints for all mankind." Expanding on the classical understanding of universal law accessible by reason, in the Seventeenth Century the Dutch jurist Grotius laid the foundations for Universal Jurisdiction in modern international law, promulgating in his De Jure Pradae (Of Captures) and later De Jure Belli ac Pacis (Of the Law of War and Peace) the Enlightenment view that there are universal principles of right and wrong.
At about the same time, international law came to recognize the analogous concept of hostes humani generis ('enemies of the human race'): pirates, hijackers, and similar outlaws whose crimes were typically committed outside the territory of any state. The notion that heads of state and senior public officials should be treated like pirates as outlaws before the global bar of justice is, according to Henry Kissinger, a new gloss on this old concept. From these two premises, the Enlightenment belief in universal standards of right and piracy law condemning universal wrongs, derives Universal Jurisdiction.
Perhaps the most notable and influential precedent for Universal Jurisdiction were the mid-20th century Nuremberg Trials. U.S. Justice Robert H. Jackson then chief prosecutor, famously stated that the International Military Tribunal could prosecute Nazi "crimes against the peace of the world" even though the acts might have been perfectly legal at the time in Fascist Germany (indeed one charge was the Nazis distorted the law itself into an instrument of oppression.) Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, argues that universal jurisdiction allowed Israel to try Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Roth also argues that clauses in treaties such as the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the United Nations Convention Against Torture of 1984, which requires signatory states to pass municipal laws that are based on the concept of universal jurisdiction, indicate widespread international acceptance of the concept.
Read more about this topic: Universal Jurisdiction
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)