Changing Scope

I haven't blogged at all over the last 6 months and it's due entirely to applying and interviewing for graduate positions in January and February, and traveling Europe since March.

From July to December I'll be working as an intern for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. During this time I hope to find the time to keep blogging, however, I wanted to make a slight change to the subject I've been writing about.

At the moment my purview is specifically state sanctioned executions. I wanted to change it slightly to include extra-judicial killings. This essentially includes genocide (the ultimate international crime) and mass murder committed by a state, a state body, the army or police. I have a strong interest in International Humanitarian Law, and mass executions are a horrifying, tragic and very real element in modern warfare.

I won't be including other warcrimes, for example torture, because then I think this blog will just start getting far too broad. I want to stick to state sanctioned and extra-judicial killings.

The obvious reason for this inclusion is that for the next 6 months I'll be working heavily with cases regarding war crimes during the Bosnian-Serbian war. As with my internship in New Orleans, I won't be able to talk about specific details of cases that I am working on, but I will be eager to write about the concept of warcrimes, the capture and trial of war criminals and any form of murder directly or indirectly undertaken by a government, government body, police or army outside the purview of the law.

During my visit to the Jewish Holocaust Museum in Berlin I saw a quote on the wall that is almost like a introduction to the horrifying expositions that follows, and it's a quote from Primo Levi an Auschwitz survivor and prolific writer.

"It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we
have to say."

It occurred to me that although the Holocaust has not been repeated in history on the same scale, it certainly has been recreated in part through numerous conflicts, Sudan, Rwanda, Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia. Even with the creation of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, it still occurs. What needs to be done to stop it from continuing? The face of war has changed, and even though it is unlikely that a state will ever adopt a calculated policy of mass extermination like Hitler and the Nazis did, there are still conflicts in which massive amounts of non-combatants are murdered. Warcrimes Tribunals such as the one I will be working with have been extremely successful in holding warcriminals to account for crimes against humanity, but a more serious question is what more can be done to ensure that these crimes aren't allowed to occur at all, and when they do, how best to prosecute them.

Once I'm settled in The Hague I'm sure there will be lots on my mind.

Quote of the day:

"I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man."

- Primo Levi

In The News - July

The Australian Government has made a big step towards ensuring that capital punishment cannot ever exist again in Australia. This is a strong message in support of global abolition and of course greatly in support of our Australians still on death row overseas.

The legislation will draw on the Commonwealth Government's external affairs power in s. 51(xxix) of the constitution. This power, it is argued, can interpreted to allow the Government to act upon international treaties, and therefore legislate on behalf of the states. The international treaty in question is the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, of which we are signatories. We have also co-sponsored a resolution for a moratorium on the death penalty.

Even though it's merely a consolidation of the status quo in Australia, it's an important step in the right direction both at home and abroad. The Human Rights Committee observed that "all steps taken to abolish the death penalty must be viewed as progress towards the enjoyment of the right to life." This is no doubt the case by closing the door completely on the death penalty.

Andrew Chan, Myuran Sukumaran and Scott Rush are still on death row in Indonesia, and so any unified approach against the death penalty will not fall on deaf ears with our closest neighbours. What more powerful message to send than a complete and irrevocable refusal to ever allow the return of the death penalty.

The legislation is expected to be past in spring. For the sake of Australians abroad I hope that not too much political debate is raised by the Opposition, because only a bipartisan approach will send a strong enough message to perhaps save lives.