SALUTE TO A MAN OF LAW AND PEACE

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 115^th 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.