LEILA NADYA SADAT
Washington University School of Law

Citizens for Global Solutions’ Legal Analyst Golzar Kheiltash recently spoke with Professor Leila Nadya Sadat, a leading international law expert and Citizens for Global Solutions Board Member. They discussed Sadat’s reflections on the International Criminal Court (ICC), 60 years after the Nuremberg trials. Professor Sadat is the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law at the Washington University School of Law, where she has taught since 1992. She is a leading authority in international criminal law and human rights and a prolific scholar. Sadat is particularly well known for her expertise on the ICC. Named to chair the International Law Association committee on the Court in 1995, she has authored and edited several scholarly reports in her capacity as chair. In addition, she was an NGO delegate to the U.N. Preparatory Committee and to the 1998 U.N. diplomatic conference in Rome where the Court was established.

What do you think the legacy of Nuremberg is and how do you think the ICC has fulfilled that legacy?

The legacy of Nuremberg has several different components. One of them is the idea that no human being is above the law. The ICC embodies this principle in its Rome Statute.

The other legacy of Nuremberg is that human beings acquire rights directly from international law. The ICC Statute provides that even those accused of heinous crimes have basic human rights.

Finally, Nuremberg stood for the idea that in the aftermath of the Holocaust, human kind couldn’t survive repeated onslaughts against fellow human beings. And of course the ICC has exactly the same notion in its preamble where it talks about humanity being like a mosaic: if you take one piece of the mosaic out by committing genocide, it is like shattering the entire picture.

Some critics of the Nuremberg trials say it was a victor’s justice. How do you respond to this, and is this similar to U.S. claims that the ICC is a politicized court?

The four Allied Powers sat in judgment of the Nazis. This doesn’t make the trial necessarily unfair. The accused Nazis were provided with excellent lawyers, had full rights and three were actually acquitted. The Nuremberg trials ensured that there was a trial at all and avoided the prospect of mass summary executions.

The ICC is nothing like Nuremberg, and that’s the whole point. The ICC is not a court created for a particular place and time. It’s not a court staffed by judges of one nation sitting in judgment of the accused of another nation after just having fought a war with them. Rather, it’s a court with a permanent retinue of the most highly qualified judges and prosecutor that every region of the world can nominate. The ICC was also created to try only cases that are prospective, not retrospective.

Why do you think international criminal law is so important in the 21st Century and how can we get Americans to recognize its importance?

When you look at how international events affect the daily lives of Americans, there’s no more keeping our heads in the sand. One of my biggest disappointments on how the U.S. has approached the “war on terror” is that it isn’t realizing that the very tools that we need to fight terror are being undermined in our attempts to weaken the laws of war and the rules against torture. If Americans could see the connection, I think they would be a lot less willing to throw out international conventions just because it seems to suit the exigencies of the situation.

Many Americans are not sufficiently informed about global conflicts like Darfur. How can advocates demonstrate the local impact of global issues such as genocide to the public?

One is to take issues that do hit home and use them to galvanize awareness that things that go on internationally affect us domestically. The other thing that could change is our media. Getting better media coverage of international events is very important, and I think the American people really do care. It’s just a question of getting the message out and realizing that we’re all interconnected.