Philippe Sands - The Nuremberg moment and the birth of international law

The Nuremberg moment happened in 1945: a group of countries came together to create the first-ever international criminal tribunal with jurisdiction over crimes against humanity and war crimes.

About Philippe Sands
"I’m Professor of Law at University College London, a Barrister at Matrix Chambers and a writer."

Key Points

• The Nuremberg moment happened in 1945: a group of countries came together to create the first-ever international criminal tribunal with jurisdiction over crimes against humanity and war crimes.
• What followed Nuremberg was the creation of new international treaties preventing genocide, and the coining of the idea of human rights – that each of us has individual rights and collective rights.
• We are in the very early stages of a change that will take many decades, if not centuries, to bear full fruition.
 
The birth of international law

The Nuremberg moment happened in 1945: a group of countries came together to create the first-ever international criminal tribunal with jurisdiction over crimes against humanity and war crimes. It was the famous Nuremberg tribunal, and it sat for about a year in the German city of Nuremberg, trying a number of senior Nazis for crimes committed during their rule.

What the Nuremberg moment did was determine, for the first time in human history, that the rights of a state, of a sovereign, of a king, of an emperor, of a president, of a Führer were not unlimited in respect of the power it exercised over its people – that individuals and groups had rights. These rights were encapsulated in two new inventions from the summer of 1945. One was the concept of crimes against humanity – the protection of individuals – which was coined by a professor of international law at Cambridge University called Hersch Lauterpacht. The other was the crime of genocide, invented by another Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. This was not about individuals, but about the protection of groups. In this Nuremberg moment, in 1945, the idea that we all have rights as individuals and as members of a group, or groups, came of age, and it has prospered ever since.