Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] INTERNATIONAL LAW AND ANTISEMITISM 43
Streicher and IMT that such a case had been brought. The defense lawyers’
invocation of freedom of speech was rejected on the grounds that “promotion
of ethnic hatred” is hate speech and therefore unprotected. Perhaps
ICTR’s most significant advance, though, was its ruling that mass rape and
other forms of sexual brutality can be construed as genocide, the first time
that an international court made such a finding. Together, ICTY and ICTR
firmly established the precedents of jurisdiction over such crimes, whether
committed in wartime or peacetime, and whether committed within a sovereign
state or across international boundaries. 23 Two other important international
criminal tribunals, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal for Cambodia and the
Special Court for Sierra Leone, were created by the Security Council.
Charles Taylor, the warlord president of Liberia, was convicted by the Special
Court in April 2012 of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed
at his behest in neighboring Sierra Leone. This was a milestone, as
Taylor became the first head of state to be convicted since the IMT convicted
Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had briefly succeeded Hitler; Taylor may
yet undergo trial for comparable crimes in Liberia.
ICTY and ICTR were not without their critics, during and since: the
proceedings were allowed to drag on for far too long—so that the president
of Serbia, Slobodan Milo˘sević, died before his trial could be concluded;
they were too much concerned with getting the small fry and not the big
fish; the chief prosecutors came and went in too rapid a succession; the
tribunals did too little to effect reconciliation of the parties in the aftermath
of the conflict; and other criticism. Two of the biggest fish, the authors of
ethnic cleansing—Radovan Karadžić, president of the Bosnian Serb Republic
of Srpska, and the commanding general of its army, Ratko Mladić—
were indicted by ICTY in 1995 on multitudinous crimes against Bosnian
Muslims and Bosnian Croats. They disappeared into hiding, but have since
come into custody and are being tried by ICTY in The Hague. The UN’s
decision to conclude the work of both tribunals in 2008 (for trials) and 2010
(for appeals) did not prevent ICTY from resuming its prosecutorial work,
especially as the UN had eliminated time limitations for prosecution of such
crimes, rendering them imprescriptible, in 1968 (came into force in 1970)
by the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to
War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity. Europe followed with an analogous
convention in 1974.
The IMT and other pivotal trials helped sustain efforts to create a permanent
international criminal court, efforts that persisted intermittently
23. Articles on the ICTR and the ICTY in Dinah M. Shelton, Ed., Encyclopedia
of Genocide and War Crimes, 547-564; William A. Schabas, An Introduction, 10-
13.