I am currently immersing myself in the spectacularly useful (albeit 2217 pages long) compilation of the Travaux Preparatoires to the Genocide Convention, that the research endeavors of Hirad Abtahi and Philippa Webb have gifted the world.
There are several gems in among it, and it is particularly interesting to see how close we got to defining genocide to include political groups (and also that the U.S. put forward an amendment to include economic groups as late in the drafting process as October 4, 1948 (the convention was adopted just two months later)).
One passage that I thought would be appropriate to share in the context of Obama’s excellent “just war” Nobel Prize speech yesterday, comes from the representative of the U.K early on in the negotiations. To any of today’s readers, it reads like R2P 101:
From the Summary Record of the 22nd meeting of the Sixth Committee to the Genocide Convention. Friday November 22, 1946
UK Representative, Sir Hartley Shawcross:
“Sir Hartley expressed the opinion that it was necessary that the evolution of new ideas in human society should be followed up closely by the relevant legislation and that international law should limit the omnipresence of certain States over their citizens and in certain cases protect them against their own Government. Grotius has written that a war was justified if it intended to defend the subjects of a foreign State against the tyranny of the sovereign . . . If humanitarian intervention by war was sometimes justified, humanitarian intervention by international law was even more definitely warranted. Dictators should be warned that if they infringed upon human rights, they acted at their own risk, and that the international law would condemn them.”
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