Like Western civilization, international law would be a very good idea (apologies to M Gandhi)

The most fascinating book I read in 2025 was Phillipe Sands' East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity". By way of his gripping, intimate story of some of the human flotsam thrown about in the violent chaos of Central Europe in the first half of the 20th century, Sands interrogates the development of our contemporary understandings of international law.

For my generation of Americans which came of age when Central Europe -- Ukraine, Hungary, what was then Czechoslovakia, what was then Yugoslavia, Austria, Poland, much of Germany -- were barely visible behind the Iron Curtain erected by Soviet Russia, it is not obvious that this region was once the heart of European civilization. But it was. And then, what we call World War I, (functionally 1914 through 1920 or so) tore up and rearranged the state entities that had ruled and organized this part of Europe. After that war, violence and chaos continued. The Austro-Hungarian empire disintegrated into unstable nationalist successor states; in Russia, the Soviets overthrew the tsar and fought a wide-ranging civil war that leached westward. Individuals were tossed about between city and country, between morphing national states and nationalities, and among competing intellectual and political influences. 

Much of this human upheaval Sands traces by chasing down evidence about the lives of four individuals whose ideas and fates continue to shape international law today. All lived in or passed through what is known today as Ukrainian Lviv, but which in this period was named Lemberg, Lvov, and then Lwow before the contemporary Ukrainian state took its current form. (Yes, Vladimir Putin is still seeking undo Ukraine's claim to national status which emerged in this period. )

Sands' characters are: 

• Hersch Lauterpacht, professor of international law, born in August 1897 in the small town of Zolkiew, a few miles from Lemberg, to which the family moved in 1911. ... In 1923, he married Rachel Steinberg in Vienna, and they had one son, Elihu, who was born in Cricklewood, London. 

• Hans Frank, a lawyer and [German Nazi] government minister, was born in Karlsruhe [Germany], in May 1900. ... In August 1942, he spent two days in Lemberg, where he delivered several speeches. [He was executed 1946 after being tried at Nuremberg for presiding over the Eastern European death camps.] 

• Rafael Lemkin, a prosecutor and lawyer, was born in Ozerisko near Bialystok, in June 1900. ... In 1921, he moved to Lwow. He never married and had no children.

• Leon Buchholz [grandfather of the author] was born in Lemberg in May 1904. ... He married Regine "Rita" Landes in Vienna in 1937, and a year later their daughter, Ruth, who is [Sands'] mother, was born there.

Sands knew little of the lives of these four when he began the project that became this book. All contributed through actions and their intellectual contributions to his professional career as one of the most distinguished international lawyers of our day.The book is the story of his investigations into their lives, of finding survivors from their families and associates who knew the men, and unraveling who lived and who died as the Nazis tore apart European civilization.

The book is a compendium of fascinating, very contingent stories. Luck played a huge role in who made it through war and tyranny and who was murdered amid the turbulent chaos.

• • • 

And, in the midst of Sands' tale of these main characters, he takes a charming detour to recount the exploits of one person otherwise lost to history: "Miss Tilney of Norwich."

Who was Miss Tilney?" I asked my mother. 

... she said, "I think she was the woman who brought me [as an infant] from Vienna to Paris in the summer of 1939," insisting there was no more information. ...

Sands was not content to leave the question of Miss Tilney there. He chased around Europe and beyond, finding additional stories of the mysterious English woman who somehow managed to hide or facilitate the escape of a few Jewish people and others at risk from the Germans in turbulent wartime Europe. He never completely uncovered her motivation for this dangerous project which could have easily cost her her life. Perhaps she adhered to a warped Christian theology about bringing on the apocalypse; perhaps she just knew it was the right thing to do. She died in 1974, still unrecognized publicly, in a Florida retirement community. Yet Sands owes his own life to her rescue of his infant Jewish mother.

• • •

Ultimately this book consists of Sands, one of the worlds' current most eminent human rights lawyers, trying to sort out the conflict between the legal "crimes against humanity" edifice that Hersch Lauterpacht brought to the British delegation at Nuremberg and the novel notion of "genocide' invented and advocated by Rafael Lemkin to the American legal delegation at that tribunal.

The most succinct description of this conflict between adjacent legal frameworks that I've seen comes, in our own moment, from M. Gessen, written in the context of reporting on the attempts by legal NGOs, humanitarian organizations and some nations to discern how Israel's murderous campaign against the people of Gaza should understood. She describes the competing legal notions like this:

... International law makes two key distinctions between genocide and the broader category of crimes against humanity. One difference involves intent: Crimes against humanity are crimes of disregard for human life, while genocide is a crime of hatred against a specific group. The other difference involves the way the world is obligated to respond: Under existing law, other countries need not prevent crimes against humanity from occurring, but the Genocide Convention does require other countries to prevent genocide. ...  

• • •

Sands affirms the value of both legal frames and describes a history of human rights advocates leaning in one direction or the other. 

 

At the Nuremberg trials which led to the execution of Hans Frank and other leading Nazis, "crimes against humanity" took center stage. But later Rafael Lemkin's coinage, "genocide," gained adherents, led by the founders of the United Nations, including especially Eleanor Roosevelt. 

Sand ponders deeply about the two ways of looking at the horrors people and nations inflict on each other. As a practitioner of international law, he tries to come to terms with their implications.

... An informal hierarchy has developed. In the years after the Nuremberg judgment, the word genocide gained traction in political circles and in public discussion as the "crime of crimes," elevating the protection of groups above that of individuals. Perhaps it was the power of Lemkin's word, but as Lauterpacht feared, there emerged a race between victims, one in which a crime against humanity came to be seen as a lesser evil. That was not the only unintended consequence of the parallel efforts of Lauterpacht and Lemkin. 

Proving the crime of genocide is difficult, and in litigating cases I have seen for myself how the need to prove the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, as the Geneva Convention requires, can have unhappy psychological consequences. It reinforces the sense of solidarity among the members of the victim group while reinforcing negative feelings toward the perpetrator group. The term "genocide" with its focus on the group, tends to heighten a sense of "them" and "us," burnishes feeling of group identity, and may unwittingly give rise to the very conditions that it seeks to address: by pitting one group against another it makes reconciliation less likely. 

I fear that the crime of genocide has distorted the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity, because the desire to be labeled a victim of genocide brings pressure on prosecutors to indict for the crime. For some, to be labeled a victim of genocide becomes "an essential component of national identity' without contributing to the resolution of historical disputes or making mass killings less frequent. It is no surprise that an editorial in a leading newspaper, on the occasion of the centenary of Turkish crimes against Armenians, suggested that the word "genocide" may be unhelpful, because it "stirs up [defensive] national outrage rather than the sort of ruthless examination of the record the country needs."

Yet against these arguments. I am bound to accept the sense of group identity is a fact. ... "Our bloody nature," the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote ... "is ingrained because group-versus-group was a principal driving force that made us what we are." It seems that a basic element of human nature is that "people feel compelled to belong to groups and, having joined, consider them superior to competing groups." 

This poses a serious challenge for our system of international law confronted by a tangible tension: on the one hand, people are killed because they happen to be members of a certain group; on the other hand the recognition of that fact by the law tends to make more likely the possibility of conflict between groups, by reinforcing the sense of group identity. ...

Sands could not and does not resolve the tension in his own mind. He sought to understand the two men who represented the two approaches. That quest led him into his own history and how he understands his own career as a human rights litigator. But he arrived at no clean conclusion:

... I [have] wondered ... whether I was closer to the ideas of Lauterpacht or Lemkin, or stood equidistant between them or sat with them both. Lemkin would probably have been the more entertaining dinner companion, and Lauterpacht the more intellectually rigorous conversationalist. The two men shared an optimistic belief in the power of law to do good and protect people and the need to change the law to achieve that objective. Both agreed on the value of a single human life and on the importance of being part of a community. They disagreed fundamentally, however, on the most effective way to achieve the protection of those values, whether by focusing on the individual or the group.

Lauterpacht never embraced the idea of genocide. To the end of his life, he was dismissive, both of the subject and, perhaps more politely, of the man who concocted it, even as he recognized the aspirational quality. Lemkin feared the separate projects of protecting individual human rights, on the one hand, and protecting groups and preventing genocide, on the other, were in contradiction. It might be said the two men cancelled each other out. 

... I saw the merits of both arguments, oscillating between the two poles, caught in an intellectual limbo.

Nothing is easy about trying to envision an international legal order based in justice. Today we watch the Trump regime tear up American fealty to the long standing law of the sea by killing men already drowning, a legal dictate that predates both human rights and genocide law .

 

Bob Dylan sang: "to live outside the law you must be honest." This is not an honest time.