International Prosecution of Human Rights Crimes

Wolfgang Kaleck · Michael Ratner · Tobias Singelnstein · Peter Weiss

Nov 2006 · Springer Science & Business Media

About this ebook

1 In his separate opinion in the Nuclear Weapons case, Judge Mohammed Bed- oui, then the President of the International Court of Justice, called nuclear we- ons “the absolute evil. ” There are a few other things which merit being called - solutely evil. They are the predicates of the International Criminal Court and of various domestic laws patterned on the Rome Statute: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and aggression. A conference organized by the Berlin-based Republikanischer Anwältinnen- und Anwälteverein (Republican Lawyers As- ciation) and the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights was held in Berlin in June 2005 under the title Globalverfassung versus Realpolitik (Global Constitution versus Realpolitik). It dealt with the tension between these univ- sally accepted norms and the actual practice of governments in an age charact- ized by the ill-defined concept of the “war on terror. ” This book is the outcome of that conference. It is intended for a wide variety of readers: academics, all kinds of jurists, as well as human rights activists, who sometimes know more about the applicable law than the legal experts. It owes its existence to a paradox: On the one hand, new structures for dealing with the most serious international crimes are being put into place.

About the author

In December 1965 Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (1964), in a presentation by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, stormed the Broadway stage, captivating audience and critic alike. The assumption that the play about the murder of Marat by Charlotte Corday might have been one of the many dramatic pieces written by Sade---and enacted by his fellow inmates for "therapeutic" reasons during the Marquis's confinement at Charenton---provided Weiss (who maintained that "every word I put down is political") with his framework for the "confrontation of the revolutionary Marat as the apostle of social improvement and the cynical individualist, the Marquis de Sade" (N.Y. Times). The Investigation (1965), which Weiss considered his best play, was first presented in 20 theaters in East and West Germany; Ingmar Bergman (see Vol. 3) was its Swedish director. It was staged in New York in 1966. Taken almost entirely from the actual proceedings of the 1965 Frankfurt War Crimes Tribunal on Auschwitz, The Investigation is a "harrowing but insistently commanding experience" (Walter Kerr, N.Y. Times). The audience, in effect, reenacts the role of the original courtroom spectators in this shattering, true account of man's depravity. Weiss received the Buchner Prize in 1982.