TCD Conf: Crimes Against Humanitarian Law

dublin | anti-war / imperialism | event notice Friday February 17, 2006 11:48 by redjade

Crimes Against Humanitarian Law :
International Trials In Perspective

A one-day conference wil be held on this topic in Trinity College Dublin on Friday, 24 February 2006.

''It seems timely to reflect on the question of international trials of crimes against humanitarian law in a broader perspective for at least three reasons. First, since the initial attempts to instigate such proceedings in 1919-21, it is possible to discern a sharply uneven development whose rythm has been driven by responses to the two world wars and the upsurge of violence after the ending of the Cold War. Of course, war is not the only phenomenon that produces extreme forms of violence, as indicated by the internal history of revolution in the USSR and China or the genocide in Rwanda - though war informed the model of Soviet and Chinese revolutionary mobilization and it could be argued that the genocide in Rwanda was in effect a civil war of the most lethal kind. But the new forms of violence that were central to the two world wars resulted in the comprehensive transgression of existing norms for the conduct of war, so that during and above all after the conflicts, it became essential to redefine the norms of acceptable behaviour in order to conceptualize and stigmatize the new types of violence. Humanitarian law redefined the norms while international trials applied them retrospectively to those accused of the most heinous transgressions. Events in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda did not produc new crimes so much as resurrect levels and types of violence against civilians which many imagined had become impossible after the end of the world wars and the Cold War (notably 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide). Over a period of eighty-five years, therefore, the shock of war has triggered new developments in international humanitarian law which have then been tested in international trials. The nature and coherence of that history seem worth considering.''

more at
http://www.tcd.ie/iiis/pages/events/crimesconference.php