The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950 (Oxford Studies in Modern European History)

Until 1919, European wars were settled without post-war trials, and individuals were not punishable under international law. After World War One, European jurists at the Paris Peace Conference developed new concepts of international justice to deal with violations of the laws of war. Though these were not implemented for political reasons, later jurists applied these ideas to other problems, writing new laws and proposing various types of courts to maintain the post-World War One political order. They also aimed to enhance internal state security, address states' failures to respect minority rights, or rectify irregularities in war crimes trials after World War Two. The Birth of the New Justice shows that legal organizations were not merely interested in ensuring that the guilty were punished or that international peace was assured. They hoped to instill particular moral values, represent the interests of certain social groups, and even pursue national agendas. When jurists had to scale back their projects, it was not only because state governments opposed them. It was also because they lacked political connections and did not build public support for their ideas. In some cases, they decided that compromises were better than nothing. Rather than arguing that new legal projects were spearheaded by state governments motivated by "liberal legalism," Mark Lewis shows that legal organizations had a broad range of ideological motives - liberal, conservative, utopian, humanitarian, nationalist, and particularist. The International Law Association, the International Association of Penal Law, the World Jewish Congress, and the International Committee of the Red Cross transformed the concept of international violation to deal with new political and moral problems. They repeatedly altered the purpose of an international criminal court, sometimes dropping it altogether when national courts seemed more pragmatic. Frontmatter Abbreviations (page ix) Footnote Key (page xi) Introduction (page 1) 1. Nineteenth Century Precursors of an International Criminal Legal System (page 14) 2. The Birth of the New Justice at the Paris Peace Conference (page 27) 3. Crimes against Humanity and Crimes of Denationalization: The Victory of Political Expediency Over Justice (page 64) 4. Blueprints for International Criminal Courts and Their Political Rejection in the 1920s (page 78) 5. International Terrorism in the 1920s and the '30s: The Response of European States through the League of Nations and the Attempt to Create an International Criminal Court (page 122) 6. The Search for a Victim-Centered New Justice, 1942-1946: The World Jewish Congress and the Institute of Jewish Affairs (page 150) 7. The Genocide Convention: The Gutting of Preventative Measures, 1946-48 (page 181) 8. Revising the Geneva Conventions, 1946-49: Synthesizing the Old and New Justice (page 229) Epilogue (page 274) Conclusion (page 290) Bibliography (page 301) Index (page 335) 'The Birth of the New Justice' is a history of the attempts to instate ad hoc and permanent international criminal courts and new international criminal laws from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Cold War. The purpose of these courts was to repress aggressive war, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide