Review: Law against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials
| DOI | 10.1350/ijep.8.4.262.60205 |
| Author | Robert Cryer |
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
262 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EVIDENCE & PROOF
REVIEW
D. Hirsch
LAW AGAINST GENOCIDE: COSMOPOLITAN TRIALS
London: Glasshouse Press (2003), xxiv +183pp, pb £26.00
The existence of international criminal law ought to be a godsend for those of a
cosmopolitan persuasion. The idea that everyone everywhere is subject to a minimum
core of criminal law which finds its basis, not in the national but the international
legal system, is grist to their mill. Similar associations are suggested by the Nuremberg
International Military Tribunal’s comment that ‘crimes against international law
are committed by men, not abstract entities’. So it is in some ways surprising that
there has not before now been any contribution to the hypertrophied body of book-
length literature on international criminal law explicitly adopting a cosmopolitan
approach. David Hirsch’s book, as might be imagined from its title, fills this gap. It is
an innovative and thoughtful work which, in spite of the grumbles that follow, is a
very welcome addition to scholarship in the area, in particular because of its
interdisciplinary methodology.
Notwithstanding Hirsch’s focus on the cosmopolitan aspects of criminal law, he is
no utopian. As he tells us early on in the Introduction, the manifestations of such
law remain ‘flashes and sparks that have momentarily lit up the landscape’ (pp. xi–
xii). But he treads a careful path. In a passage reminiscent of E. P. Thompson’s
comment in Whigs and Hunters that ‘the law may be rhetoric, but it need not be
empty rhetoric’ (Penguin, 1977, p. 263), Hirsch notes that underlying the US refusal
to accept that the killings in Rwanda in May 1994 were genocide was an acceptance
that ‘the moral power of the term genocide which stems partly from its legal existence,
is considerable’ (p. xiv). The implicit paradox of a refusal to accept that something is
what it is because acceptance will involve legal consequences should be clear to
anyone who has acquainted themselves with the declassified documents relating to
US treatment of detainees and the now notorious activities at Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq.
The idea of cosmopolitan trials obviously implies some notion of cosmopolitan law,
and it is to this that Chapter One turns. In particular the chapter focuses on the
(2004) 8 E&P 262–266
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