No More Victors’ Justice?
Stephen Sedley considers the future of international criminal jurisdiction
On 11 August 1942 Joseph Bursztyn, a doctor in the French Resistance, was executed as a hostage in reprisal for Resistance attacks on German troops occupying Paris. The previous month his wife had been arrested by the Vichy police and deported to the German death camps. Their small daughter, Claire, who was saved by neighbours, this summer saw Maurice Papon, who was responsible for her mother’s deportation, released after less than three years in prison.
On a summer’s day in 1944, with France newly liberated, Henri Boleslawski, who during the Vichy years had worked as an official in the préfecture of Tulle forging identity documents for the Resistance and for the Allied airmen they were sheltering, put his daughter, Liliane, on his shoulders to watch the execution of a collaborator in the place du Champ de Mars. For him, a moment of historic justice; for the child, an image of cruelty which has never left her.
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This essay is based on Stephen Sedley’s Plymouth Law Society’s Pilgrim Fathers Lecture, given last autumn
[*] Penguin, 688 pp., £10.99, July 2002, 0 14 101014 2.
[†] Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in International Law (Oxford, 484 pp., £60 and £16.99, April 2001, 0 19 924833 8).