Judge Kevin Parker outlines the development of humanitarian law, 2008

Transcript of sound recording

The law dealing with human rights violations has substantially developed only since World War Two. Crimes against humanity and war crimes, they're very close relatives, but they come from two different origins.

War crimes have always been dealing with a time of armed conflict, and they stipulate essentially how two armies fight a war, and they make it a serious crime if certain things are done, such as deliberately killing civilians without any military necessity, killing prisoners of war, killing wounded and things of that nature. Crimes against humanity don't have anything to do with a war, but they are serious abuses of a position which one person has, or one group of people has, against others. You will find in both things the offences like murder, wilful destruction of property, seriously injuring another person. But the distinction comes as to whether it's during an armed conflict, which is war, or whether it is an extensive and serious occurrence just generally occurring.

In World War Two there was clearly very widespread armed conflict in many parts of the world, including Europe and Asia, and so the law of war was clearly operative. But within the country of Germany itself there was also a very widespread abuse of certain sections of that population - for example, those of the Jewish race, those who were Romas as they were called, those who were mentally deficient. Each of those were identified by the German government of the day, the Nazi government, and they were singled out for persecution. Very many of them were very gravely mistreated and very many of them were killed.

And it was that occurrence by a government against its own people, when there was no armed conflict between them, which has led to the human rights set of laws, and the first international criminal tribunals were established - one in Europe, and usually called the Nuremberg Tribunal, the other one in Asia, usually called the Tokyo Tribunal. And these dealt principally with breaches by the Nazis - the German army that is - and by the Japanese armed forces during World War Two. The body of law that was developed to deal with those offenders was at a simple and preliminary stage of development.

Since then, the next tribunals established dealt with the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, and one which dealt with the terrible problems in the African country of Rwanda. These tribunals have dealt with very many cases now, in each case over some 15 years, and they have taken the basic principles of law established in the Nuremberg and the Tokyo tribunals and have expanded and developed those so that we now have a pretty comprehensive body of law to enable the international trial of offenders, and to deal with questions of evidence and procedure. There really was no such body of law before. So what has been developed now is able to be used by the various tribunals that come to be established to deal with particular problems, such as Sierra Leone or Lebanon or Cambodia or East Timor, and a number of others.