War Crimes and the Culture of Peace

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, and Chile and the Nazis, and the coauthor of Invisible and
Inaudible in Washington: American Policies To

In 1996, the United Nations Security Council appointed Louise Arbour
(now a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada) chief prosecutor for the
International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for
Rwanda. On January 11, 2001, Arbour gave a speech—the fifth in a
series of annual lectures in honor of Senator Keith Davey—about her
experiences in that role at The Hague. This short book is the speech in
published form.

Arbour argues that international criminal trials, often conducted in
defiance of the defendant’s home government, serve the cause of peace.
The tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had 14 justices from 14 different
countries and an annual budget of $95 million. By the time of her
speech, there had been indictments against 96 people, of whom two
pleaded guilty, one won an acquittal, eight died, and one committed
suicide. The tribunal withdrew charges against 18 others. The tribunal
for Rwanda also had 14 justices from as many countries; its staff
numbered 700, and its budget in 2000 was $80 million.

Arbour quotes from Brigadier-General Telford Taylor, chief U.S.
prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. He found that trials for those
charged with crimes against humanity—even crimes conducted at the
behest of their governments—served the interests of both victims and
defendants. He believed that the world ought to know why and how such
horrors had happened, and that everyone deserves assurance that they are
not ongoing or likely to spread. As Arbour points out, citizens of
democracies need not fear loss of sovereignty: “International criminal
law reaches out to those who live in states where none are safe and none
are free.”

As the trials of alleged criminals from the former Yugoslavia and
Rwanda continue, and as the administration of President George W. Bush
tries to undermine the International Criminal Court, Justice Arbour’s
speech has even greater relevance and ought to be read widely.