Ben Ferencz is the kind of guy you like right off—friendly, smiling,
open, and incredibly humble considering his stunning achievements. I was lucky
enough to make Ben’s acquaintance through a mutual friend, former Chief
Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno Ocampo. Since I was
in the midst of in-depth research for a book that was to be, in part, about the
link between international justice and world peace, Luis thought Ben was
somebody I needed to meet.
 |
| Ben and I at his winter home in Florida. |
Still highly active despite then being on the threshold of his tenth
decade, Ben met with me while he was visiting The Hague, where Moreno Ocampo
had asked him to provide some concluding comments at the closing of the ICC case
against Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for crimes against humanity.
I was there, as an observer, on Moreno Ocampo’s invitation as well.
Ben and I seemed to hit it off right away, and we cemented our
friendship still further in visits I paid to him at his winter home in Florida,
where he was to make helpful, to-the-point suggestions on my work in progress. He
would later recommend it in a brief video once my research finally morphed into
a book published in Spanish under the title of La guerra: un crimen contra la humanidad—and soon to be published
in English as War: A Crime against
Humanity, a title that Ben himself suggested in that very same video.
 |
Ben wearing his newly awarded
Medal of Freedom
|
Anyway, I mention Ben today because he has just become the recipient of
the coveted Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded by the School of Law at
his alma mater, Harvard University. The award commemorates the achievements of individuals
who have worked to uphold the rule of law and the legal system’s fundamental
commitment to freedom, justice, and equality. Past recipients have included
South Africa’s iconic leader Nelson Mandela, Iftikhar Chaudhry (former Chief
Justice of the Pakistani Supreme Court who despite a military coup and
subsequent crackdown on all opponents, faced detention to convene the court and
declare the de facto regime null and void), and soldier-scholar-attorney, US
General Mark Martins, founding commander of the Rule of Law Field Force in
Afghanistan.
That said, clearly, no one is more deserving of this honor than Ben. An
iconic figure in international law and the last living Nuremberg Trials
prosecutor, Ben’s is a truly American story: Born in Transylvania (Rumania),
his Jewish family migrated to the United States after Transylvania was ceded to
Hungary, where Jews were being harshly persecuted. Ben was ten months old at
the time. Like many European Jews, his family settled in New York City and Ben
was to grow up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
 |
Ben as a little boy with his father, Joseph, and
sister, Pearl. Like many European Jews, his
family immigrated to New York to escape
persecution.
|
Ever an impassioned advocate of justice, after studying crime prevention
at New York City College, Ben won a scholarship to study law at Harvard. He
graduated from Harvard Law in 1943, still in time to join the war effort against
Hitler and Fascism in Europe. He eventually formed part of the 115th
Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion until 1945, when he was reassigned to the
headquarters of General George Patton’s Third Army, and to a team charged with
the task of collecting evidence of Nazi war crimes. As part of that task, he
accompanied the US Army in the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps,
where millions of people had languished in sub-human conditions throughout the
war and where many other millions of his fellow Jews had perished as part of
Hitler’s extermination plan for Jews, Gypsies and other minorities.
Only weeks after his discharge from the Army at the end of 1945, Ben was
recruited for the legal team of then-Colonel Telford Taylor for what were
eventually known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, for which, after receiving
a promotion to Brigadier General in 1946, Taylor would be appointed Chief
Counsel for the United States. Taylor, in turn, would subsequently appoint Ben
to be Chief Prosecutor for the Einsatzgruppen Case. The Einsatzgruppen were
basically Nazi SS death squads that, from 1941 to 1943, were responsible for
the murders of more than a million Jews, as well as of anti-Nazi partisans,
Gypsies and disabled persons, among others.
 |
| The 27-year-old Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg (Photo: Paul Gantt Collection, Towson University) |
Despite the fact that this was the young attorney’s baptism by fire—he
was twenty-seven at the time—all twenty-two former Nazis that he prosecuted in
this ninth of the twelve Nuremberg Trials carried out before special courts
martial were convicted of war crimes. The court sentenced fourteen of them to
death, though only four ended up actually being executed—the others having
effectively served prison sentences ranging from eight years to life.
But Ben didn’t leave Germany after the Nuremberg Trials were over. He
remained there with his new bride, Gertrude—with whom he was to have four
children—until 1957. During that time, he played an active role in creating reparation
and rehabilitation programs for the victims of Nazi persecution. He also
participated in negotiations that would eventually lead to an historic
Reparations Agreement signed between Israel and Germany in 1952, and had a hand
in drafting the German Restitution Law of 1953.
When at last Ben returned to the United States, more than a decade after
his participation in the Nuremberg Trials, it was to enter into private
practice with former General Telford Taylor as his law partner. Although he
would practice private law for thirteen years after that, his World War II
experiences continued to have a profound influence on him, as did the
then-unfolding developments in the Vietnam War. As a result, Ben decided to
leave private practice and work actively for the institution of an international
criminal court that he envisioned as a kind of “supreme world court” with the
power to try any and all perpetrators of aggression, war crimes and crimes
against humanity.
In the intervening years, Ben has become a highly recognized authority
on this subject, and has published related studies, the earliest of which was
his 1975 book entitled Defining International Aggression—The Search for
World Peace, in which he, for the first time, argued a concrete connection
between properly empowered international justice and the establishment of world
peace.
 |
Ben happily holding the text of the Rome
Treaty for the creation of the ICC.
|
Ben would see his dream of an International Criminal Court come to only
partial fruition in 2002, with the signing and ratification by the majority of
countries around the world of the Rome Statute calling for its creation, but
with his own United States first signing but not ratifying the treaty under
President Bill Clinton and later “unsigning” it and refusing to recognize the
ICC under the government of George W. Bush.
Since then, Ben has frequently argued that the United States should be
true to its founding principles of equality and justice and join the ICC fully
and without reservation. As for his country’s blatant disregard for
international law, he argued in a 2005 interview that if former Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein was to be tried for war crimes, so too should George W. Bush be,
for having ignited the Iraq War without the permission of the United Nations
Security Council and in violation of international law. With regard to the
capture and killing by US special forces of international Islamic terrorist
Osama Bin Laden under the administration of current US President Barack Obama,
while others were celebrating, Ben would remain true to his principles and
argue in The New York Times that the "illegal
and unwarranted execution—even of suspected mass murderers—undermines
democracy."
In short, it is Ben’s noble and admirable belief that no one should be
above the law and the ICC should be the court of last resort for the trial of
every perpetrator of wars of aggression and crimes against humanity, regardless
of the color of their flag, the side of history that they are on, or the
international power that they wield.
Ben’s motto, which serves as a banner on his website at www.benferencz.org, is “Law. Not war.” This would be the perfect rule by which to govern
every country in the world and all international relations. The day that this
simple and concise maxim becomes the rule of law in the world’s leading
nations, world peace will be within our grasp.
Congratulations, Ben, and thanks for your shining example.
Comments
Post a Comment