Universal Jurisdiction - History

History

"All nations," says the International Treatise published under the authority of Roman Emperor Justinian (c. 482-565) " . . .are governed partly by their own particular laws, and partly by those laws which are common to all, natural Reason appoints for all mankind." Expanding on the classical understanding of universal law accessible by reason, in the Seventeenth Century the Dutch jurist Grotius laid the foundations for Universal Jurisdiction in modern international law, promulgating in his De Jure Pradae (Of Captures) and later De Jure Belli ac Pacis (Of the Law of War and Peace) the Enlightenment view that there are universal principles of right and wrong.

At about the same time, international law came to recognize the analogous concept of hostes humani generis ('enemies of the human race'): pirates, hijackers, and similar outlaws whose crimes were typically committed outside the territory of any state. The notion that heads of state and senior public officials should be treated like pirates as outlaws before the global bar of justice is, according to Henry Kissinger, a new gloss on this old concept. From these two premises, the Enlightenment belief in universal standards of right and piracy law condemning universal wrongs, derives Universal Jurisdiction.

Perhaps the most notable and influential precedent for Universal Jurisdiction were the mid-20th century Nuremberg Trials. U.S. Justice Robert H. Jackson then chief prosecutor, famously stated that the International Military Tribunal could prosecute Nazi "crimes against the peace of the world" even though the acts might have been perfectly legal at the time in Fascist Germany (indeed one charge was the Nazis distorted the law itself into an instrument of oppression.) Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, argues that universal jurisdiction allowed Israel to try Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Roth also argues that clauses in treaties such as the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the United Nations Convention Against Torture of 1984, which requires signatory states to pass municipal laws that are based on the concept of universal jurisdiction, indicate widespread international acceptance of the concept.