Crimes Against Humanity Initiative Meets at the Hague

An expanded group of experts, including judges and practitioners from international criminal tribunals operating around the world, gathered at the Hague Intersessional Experts’ Meeting of the Crimes Against Humanity (CAH) Initiative. As they addressed key aspects of the draft convention, group members built on the substantial progress of the earlier St. Louis meeting.

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The two-year CAH Initiative, which is under the auspices of the law school’s Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute and headed by Leila Nadya Sadat, the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law, will culminate with a global conference at which the final draft of the multilateral treaty will be discussed. The June 11-12 Intersessional Meeting was convened in The Hague at Leiden University’s Campus Den Haag.

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“The setting in the Hague facilitated the participation of leading judges and practitioners, including those from the International Criminal Court, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Special Court for Sierra Leone, Khmer Rouge Tribunal, and Special Tribunal for Lebanon,” Sadat said. “The CAH Initiative’s Steering Committee benefitted greatly from their counsel during our second experts meeting. Significant progress also was made at the meeting on the specific language for the treaty draft.”

The Honorable J.J van Aartsen, mayor of the City of The Hague, welcomed the participants to the international city of peace and justice. He noted that it was “a great honor” for the city to host the meeting, and remarked in closing: “Where lawlessness and absence of rights prevail, people cannot live in peace. Where injustice goes unpunished, old conflicts keep flaring up again.”

Over the course of the meeting, panel discussions addressed the need for a crimes against humanity convention, the particular problems of enforcement, and the relationship between the proposed convention and the International Criminal Court. Additionally, a technical advisory session focused on the draft treaty language.

Those participating in the panel discussions and technical session included CAH Steering Committee members:

• Leila Nadya Sadat, chair, and the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law and director of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute, Washington University Law;
• M. Cherif Bassiouni, the Distinguished Research Professor of Law and president emeritus, International Human Rights Law Institute, DePaul University;
• Ambassador Hans Corell, former United Nations Under-Secretary for Legal Affairs;
• Justice Richard Goldstone, former justice of the South African Constitutional Court and former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia;
• Juan Méndez, former president of the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights;
• William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights of the National University of Ireland, Galway; and
• Judge Christine Van Den Wyngaert, of the International Criminal Court.

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Gareth Evans, former Foreign Minister of Australia and current president of the International Crisis Group, also addressed the CAH Initiative group during a keynote address. Evans spoke movingly about his association as a student with young Cambodians, all of whom later died in the mass atrocities committed by Pol Pot’s regime. He noted that the memory of what must have happened to these young men and women haunts him to this day.

That experience, Evans said, is what makes him “intensely committed to the great enterprise on which this panel of experts is now engaged … to draft and secure the ultimate adoption of a new Convention on Crimes Against Humanity.” He observed that the treaty will “fill a gap that has all too obviously become apparent in the array of legal instruments available to deal with atrocity crimes, notwithstanding the emergence of the International Criminal Court.”

Significantly, Evans noted that the convention will put “in place mechanisms to enable effective international cooperation in the investigation and punishment of perpetrators.” Evans also congratulated Sadat and the other distinguished members of the Steering Committee on the project, and said that he had every confidence “that it will bear real fruit.”

The Hague Intersessional Experts’ Meeting was generously funded by a leadership grant from alumnus Steven Cash Nickerson and the United States Institute of Peace, and locally supported by Leiden University’s Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the City of The Hague.