Reflections on International Criminal Justice
| Author | Antonio Cassese |
| Published date | 01 January 1998 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00124 |
| Date | 01 January 1998 |
Reflections on International Criminal Justice
Antonio Cassese*
This lecture focuses on four topics, all of which are intimately connected with
international criminal tribunals, their mandate and their work. These topics may be
posed in the form of four questions:
(i) Why, in the case of war crimes and crimes against humanity, is justice better
than revenge, forgetting or amnesty?
(ii) Why, for these crimes, should we prefer international justice to national
justice?
(iii)Is international criminal justice at odds with peace?
(iv) What are the major stumbling blocks to international criminal justice?
Justice vs revenge, amnesia and amnesty
Why is justice better than revenge, in the case of war crimes and crimes against
humanity? Revenge is undoubtedly a primitive form of justice — a private system
of law enforcement. It has, however, an altogether different foundation from justice
— an implacable logic of hatred and retaliation. Revenge can nevertheless be the
last resort of persons who are denied due process. As the history of the Armenian
genocide illustrates, when there is no justice in response to the extermination of a
people, the result is that victims are led to take the law into their own hands, both to
exact retribution and to draw attention to the denied historical fact. Hannah Arendt,
in a well-known work, furnishes two precedents for this phenomenon:
There was the case of Shalom Schwartzbard, who in Paris on May 25, 1926, shot and killed
Simon Petlyura, former hetman [sic] of the Ukrainian armies and responsible for the
pogroms during the Russian civil war that claimed about a hundred thousand victims
between 1917 and 1920. And there was the case of the Armenian Tehlirian, who, in 1921, in
the middle of Berlin, shot to death Talaat Bey, the great killer in the Armenian pogroms of
1915. .. . [The point is that] neither of these assassins was satisfied with killing ‘his’
criminal, but immediately gave themselves up to the police and insisted on being tried. Each
used his trial to show the world through court procedure what crimes against his people had
been committed and gone unpunished.
1
The Modern Law Review Limited 1998 (MLR 61:1, January). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1
* Judge, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, The Hague.
This is the text of the twenty-fifth Chorley Lecture, delivered at the London School of Economics and
Political Science on 11 June 1997.
1 H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1994) 265.
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