The international criminal justice system was prejudiced from the start

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Philippe Sands has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Three generations ago, Britain and the United States joined forces to propose the establishment of a revamped international rules-based system to remake the world. This was initially articulated in a document that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter, signed in August 1941. Other countries, including the Soviet Union, were persuaded to join the effort, part of a grouping that came to be known as the United Nations.

The new rules would address trade and other economic matters, decolonisation, war and the fundamental rights of human beings. In the summer of 1945, the Statute of the Nuremberg Tribunal was drafted, reflecting agreement on a list of international crimes and the notion of individual criminal liability, up to the very highest levels of public office.

The first leaders to be held to account for the quartet of international crimes were Nazis, later convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression (it is forgotten that they were let off the newly invented crime of genocide, largely because the Americans feared it might be applied to them in relation to their treatment of blacks and Native Americans). From the outset, accountability was a lopsided affair.

What came next is the subject of Steve Crawshaw’s character-driven account, paying homage to those engaged in the modern system of international criminal justice. An advocate of global efforts to prosecute the most powerful, the author adopts a mainly chronological approach, from Nuremberg and the 1948 Convention outlawing genocide to five wilderness decades. These were marked by the failure to create a permanent international criminal court and establish the basis for universal jurisdiction, allowing courts of any country to exercise jurisdiction over perpetrators of the most serious international crimes.