Judge Kevin Parker discusses grave human rights violations, 2008

Transcript of sound recording

I had been a judge in Australia, dealing with criminal cases. I thought I had seen a fair bit. But when I came to deal with war crimes that had been committed in the former Yugoslavia and that had been committed in Rwanda, the extent and scale of what had been done was something I had not been able to understand and appreciate before. You literally have, say in Rwanda, some 8,000 people simply murdered in just a few days. You have thousands of people who are put to death in prisoner-of-war camps in the Balkans.

You can say that quickly, but if you stop and think about it, that shows a prolonged, terrible degree of inhumanity and that's on a scale which is beyond, I think, the comprehension of most people. And then when you sit and try a case and it's quite usual to hear a case where the accused is alleged to be responsible for, say, the death of 500 people, or the death of 2,000 people, or to have burnt or destroyed a whole town or city, that is some hundreds of houses, or to have caused the displacement of 60 or 80,000 or over 100,000 people from their homes by destroying the homes and forcing whole families just out into the elements without shelter, without food, without their possessions - that's a scale which thankfully we don't normally encounter in our lives.

It makes you realise that in a time of great civil unrest, where hatred has built up between different ethnic sections of a community, or different religious groups within a community, the passion, the sense of hatred that builds up, can be so intense that people collectively commit offences which the individuals would normally never think that they would be capable of committing. It's a group conduct which goes beyond the capacity of individuals. When you come to deal with the individuals who are concerned in that, most of them are really very ordinary human beings who in their ordinary lives in some other setting, you would know them as ordinary citizens and not understand or expect that they could be capable of committing grave offences. It's only when they're put in this mass emotion - it's almost a mass hysteria - that you find they have been capable of these grave ongoing offences. And I think that should warn every person - should warn all of us - that if you let yourself get caught up in such a turmoil, you may find that you lose your sense of right and wrong, and what then emerges is this grave and callous indifference to the life and wellbeing of others.

We hope in the work of the international tribunals that, by identifying individuals who've been particular leaders at this time of great upheaval, and by prosecuting them and where the evidence establishes it convicting them and punishing them, that it will help not only the people in the particular country where this occurred, but in other parts of the world, to see the dangers of what can happen, and to try and guard against repetitions of this sort of terrible conduct.