Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
one by a large armed man and another by a small unarmed man, is it better to be
morally consistent and walk past both incidents? The just war principle of avoiding
conflict escalation can be applied to humanitarian intervention to give a practical
working doctrine which, if not perfect, is surely better than doing nothing.
Empowering the individual – international
human rights law
Table 5.5 charts the progress of international human rights law over the last two
centuries. Developments have tended to occur amid the optimism of reconstruction
following major international wars, dating back to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in
Europe. The unparalleled human suffering associated with the Second World War
predictably provided the major catalyst.
Though the word did not exist at the time, the first systematic international
political response to an act of genocide occurred during the First World War
when a declaration was made by the allied powers, France, Russia and Great Britain,
about the Turkish massacres of Armenians. The 1915 declaration stated that the
allied powers would hold the Ottoman government responsible for the various
atrocities going on as well as the mobs directly responsible. The allies, however,
were only partly true to their word on the termination of the war. Under the terms of
the Treaty of Sevres, Turkey was obliged to bring to justice those responsible for the
massacres. Some Turks were prosecuted internally and Great Britain even took
the step of holding some of the suspects themselves, incarcerating them in Maltese
jails before returning them to Turkey in 1921. The ‘Young Turk’ revolution of
1922, however, brought about a reconciliation between the allied powers and the new
secular Turkish republic and a new treaty (the Lausanne Treaty) in 1923 absolved
the new government of responsibility for pursuing crimes committed in the Ottoman
era (Schabas 2000: 14–22).
In 1951 the International Court of Justice declared that, since the convention
was so widely ratified, genocide came into the category of ‘customary international
law’, making it a crime anywhere in the world. This means that genocide can be
understood as a rare case of public international law functioning as ‘proper’ law.
Countries which have not ratified the convention are not excluded from its
jurisdictional reach 7 and there is a duty on all states which have ratified it to prosecute
those guilty of the crime where they can. The precedent for the universal jurisdiction
of the genocide convention was established by the 1962 Eichmann case when Israeli
secret agents kidnapped the former Nazi General and tried him in Israel for anti-
Jewish genocide. 8 Twenty years later the USA agreed to Israel’s request for another
suspected mass murderer, John Demjanjuk, to be extradited for trial. Additionally,
Canada and Australia had trials in the 1990s against naturalized citizens for
participation in Second World War atrocities against Jews in which the accused were
acquitted but the principle of universal jurisdiction confirmed. 9 The 1990s revivals of
both genocide and international morality gave fresh impetus to the principle of
enforcing the 1948 convention and saw, among others, successful cases brought in
Germany and Belgium for crimes against humanity committed in Bosnia and
Rwanda. 10
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