Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] INTERNATIONAL LAW AND ANTISEMITISM 45
human rights treaties promulgated since 1945 include provision for redress,
although there is little definition of what constitutes effective redress or
what means are to be used under international law if a particular state fails
in its obligation to afford appropriate rectification. Remedies in the form of
war reparations can be traced as far back as the seventeenth century, normally
in agreements between states such as those required of Germany in
the Versailles Treaty of 1919. A distinct new form of claim began to take
shape in the course of World War II, when Shalom Adler-Rudel became
director of the Central British Fund to assist Jewish refugees. Adler-Rudel
was himself a refugee who had suffered Nazi outrages and fled Germany.
From 1939, he initiated preparation of a series of precise compilations of
Jewish losses and participated in formulating a program for collective
indemnification. In 1941, he presented exact figures for Jewish losses suffered
in Germany and Austria. Adler-Rudel also laid out the unprecedented
nature of the situation—that reparations were not being demanded by one
state of another, but instead by a people whose government was inflicting a
war of destruction and atrocity on them. Hence, as German occupation
engulfed more and more of the continent, demands arose for restitution not
only to individuals but to the (stateless) Jewish people for the loss of cultural
assets and institutions such as libraries, synagogues, and schools, the
obliteration of whole communities, and the “damage done to the very fabric
of the Jewish people’s existence.” In the course of the war, the Allies
accepted the principle of collective claims in considerable measure, and by
1945, when calculations of losses totaled in excess of six billion dollars,
collective reparations had become a key aim. In time, Israel was recognized
by the Allies as the claimant in behalf of the Jewish people and a succession
of German (Federal Republic of West Germany; East Germany rejected
acknowledgement of Jewish claims) compensation laws and agreements
were concluded between 1948 and 1965, most notably the treaty of 1952.
More recent agreements have been worked out or claims settled in courts
pertaining to slave labor, stolen art, expropriated businesses, and the like. 25
The innovative plan of collective compensation that began with Shalom
Adler-Rudel found its way into the growing number of human rights
treaties and became the model for later claimants, such as the Organisation
of African Unity (OAU) when it appointed a committee “to explore the
modalities and strategies of an African campaign for restitution [for slavery
or slave trade] similar to the compensation paid by Germany to Israel and to
survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.” 26 A further development may be seen in
the creation of the UN Compensation Commission by the Security Council
25. Dinah L. Shelton, Remedies in International Human Rights Law, 400-404.
26. Dinah L. Shelton, Remedies, 451.