- Person
- Hersch Lauterpacht
- Lived
- 1897–1960
- Field
- International law
- From
- British (born in Austrian Galicia)
The story
Hersch Lauterpacht was born in 1897 in Żółkiew, near Lwów, now Lviv in Ukraine, to a devout Jewish family. He studied law in Lemberg and Vienna, earned a doctorate at the London School of Economics, and in 1938 became Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge. The central idea of his work was that the sovereign rights of states did not entitle governments to treat their own citizens however they wished, and that international law should protect individual human beings.
The Second World War gave that idea new urgency. In 1942 the American Jewish Committee invited him to write a book on the international law of human rights, which appeared in 1945 as An International Bill of the Rights of Man. At the British government's request he also revised the War Office manual on the law of war on land, insisting that obeying the orders of a government or a superior was no defence to a charge of committing a war crime, though it might be considered in mitigation. The position caused a stir at the time.
After the war he sat on the British War Crimes Executive in 1945 and 1946. He helped in setting up the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, assisted both the American chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, and the British chief prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, and wrote a considerable part of Shawcross's opening and closing statements. It was Lauterpacht who recommended using the terms war crimes and crimes against humanity, and he made sure that the defence of only following orders would not succeed. At Nuremberg it was rejected. Shawcross later wrote to him that he hoped Lauterpacht would feel satisfaction at having had a leading hand in something that might influence the future conduct of international relations.
He did this work while grieving. His parents and siblings had been murdered by the Nazis in August 1942 during the occupation of Lviv, and English Heritage records that he lost all but one of his relatives in Poland. Dorothy Stone of the Jewish Historical Society of England wrote that he acted not out of vengeance but in the hope that such a catastrophe might never happen again.
Lauterpacht later sat as a judge of the International Court of Justice and was knighted in 1956. His concept of crimes against humanity, which focuses on the protection of individuals, sits alongside Raphael Lemkin's concept of genocide, which focuses on the protection of groups, at the foundation of modern international criminal law.
Why it matters
The charge of crimes against humanity is now a pillar of international criminal law, used by courts to hold leaders personally accountable for atrocities against civilians.
About Hersch Lauterpacht
Galician-born Cambridge jurist who put the individual at the heart of international law, helped bring “crimes against humanity” to Nuremberg, and sat on the World Court.
More about Hersch Lauterpacht
- Hersch Lauterpacht launched the International Law ReportsIn 1929 Hersch Lauterpacht and Arnold McNair started the Annual Digest of International Law Cases, now the International Law Reports, an essential resource running to dozens of volumes.
- Hersch Lauterpacht edited the classic international law textFor 25 years Hersch Lauterpacht edited Oppenheim's International Law so thoroughly that it became known in legal circles as Lauterpacht's Oppenheim.
- Hersch Lauterpacht's ideas shaped two human rights chartersEnglish Heritage notes that Hersch Lauterpacht's 1945 book An International Bill of the Rights of Man helped form the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention.
- Hersch Lauterpacht helped codify the law of treatiesAs a member of the UN International Law Commission in the early 1950s, Hersch Lauterpacht served as its special rapporteur on the law of treaties.
Sources
- Hersch Lauterpacht blue plaque English Heritage
- Hersch Lauterpacht Wikipedia
- Sir Hersch Lauterpacht: teacher, writer and judge Jewish Historical Society of England
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