By Chad Gustafson
Originally published by the Post-Journal in Jamestown, NY
31 August 2011
MAYVILLE – Prosecutors of international war crimes tribunals are setting their sights on Muammar Gadhafi and other high-ranking members of his party in the fifth annual Chautauqua Declaration.
The declaration was read and signed Tuesday to close the fifth annual International Humanitarian Law Dialogues at Chautauqua Institution.
The declaration, created throughout this summer by eight of the world’s 13 chief prosecutors in international war crimes tribunals, aims to highlight progress that has been made throughout the past year in the arena of international war crime development and it stresses the importance of furthering that development so as to make war torn and corrupt regions of the world ultimately safer places, according to David Crane, who from 2002 until 2005 served as the chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
This year the declaration focused on the accomplishments of last year- notably the trials of Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, “thus signaling to all fugitives from international justice the international community’s commitment to bringing them to account,” the declaration reads. Successes in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Libya, where Muammar Gadhafi and high ranking members of his party have been issued arrest warrants are also mentioned.
“This is a historical document,” Crane said. “It is the only time ever that you get the signatures of the chief prosecutors in all the world’s international tribunals and courts, and so it’s very important. It captures the sense of the world’s prosecutors about the state of international crime law in one place.”
The signing of the declaration was the culmination of the fifth annual International Humanitarian Law Dialogs, a three day event co-hosted by Chautauqua Institution and the Robert H. Jackson Center, which featured lectures and other seminars from Crane and his colleagues that addressed the ongoings of the court system they are currently working for or previously worked for, among other topics related to international humanitarian law.
Crane added that the venue is fitting given that just miles down the road from Chautauqua Institution, Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor of the Nazi regime after World War Two and often credited as the architect of modern international war crime law, was born and raised.
“We have a unique situation here,” Crane said. “Since Robert Jackson there are only 13 international chief prosecutors in the world and we all like each other, we’re friends, so what a terrible thing it would be if we took advantage of the rare occasion to see each other? … And I think Robert Jackson would have enjoyed this. He was a man of great life and would have loved to sit on the porch of the Athenaeum and look around to see his fellow chief prosecutors and talk about what he was thinking and the things he was concerned about- that’s exactly what we’ve been doing here.”
Moving into the autumn months, Crane said that of all the work currently being done in his field throughout the world, everyone is keeping their eyes on the Middle East.
“We’re concerned about what these dictators and thugs are doing to their people,” Crane said. “But we’re also concerned about these peoples who have been oppressed for so long- them taking revenge. Both ways is a problem so we’re going to see for the next two or three years a very testy and tumultuous Middle East. …It’s the most significant geopolitical event that we’ve had since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
