The short tractate De officio legati by Stephanus Doletus (Étienne Dolet) was printed by the author at his printing establishment at Lyons in 1541. All books with Dolet’s imprint are rare, many of them having been destroyed as heretical. From his press at Lyons between 1538 and 1544 proceeded 84 titles, no one library possessing more than a fraction of the total number bearing his imprint.

In rejavor. In re Munyeshyaka.

French Cour de cassation, Criminal Chamber, March 26, 1996.

In Re Munyeshyaka. 1998 Bull, crim., No. 2, at 3.

French Cour de cassation, Criminal Chamber, January 6, 1998.

In the Javor case, certain Bosnian victims of the policy of “ethnic cleansing” that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina, who were refugees in France, tried to rely on the universal jurisdiction of the French courts in order to file a criminal complaint (plainte avec constitution departie civile) with an investigating magistrate (juge d'instruction) against their Serb torturers.

The Hague Conferences that produced the Conventions of 1899 and 1907 closed the nineteenth century and opened the twentieth. They established an agenda for negotiation, in the parliamentary-diplomatic mode, for the next hundred years; elevated the development of mechanisms of dispute resolution to new prominence; tried to order many areas of armed conflict with new international law; and, perhaps unintentionally, set parameters for the future diplomacy of international conferences.

Subsequent international lawmaking efforts grappled with many of the themes debated at The Hague, even as the political landscape of international law was completely transformed by the breakup of empires and the advent of almost two hundred new states; the founding of international organizations and regional organizations that could scarcely have been imagined in 1899, and the establishment of a truly permanent international judicial institution, followed by the creation of many other judicial institutions with more focused jurisdictions. Despite these changes, much of the style of the Hague Conferences left a deep imprint on international law. The mixture of lofty rhetoric, prophetic international legal vision, and narrow political interest of the Hague Conferences became a characteristic, even an expected feature, of collective international lawmaking efforts in this century.

In an article published in this Journal in 1932, Professor Edwin Dickinson pointed out that the Supreme Court, in the first thirty years of its existence, dealt with 82 cases which raised questions of international law. The Court and counsel before it repeatedly cited the familiar writers on the law of nations: Grotius, Pufendorf, Bynkershoek, Burlamaqui, Rutherforth, and Vattel. As Dickinson pointed out, “It is an ancient doctrine of the Anglo-American common law that the law of nations is incorporated in and in some sense forms part of the national law.” Largely through decisions based on the principles expressed by the classical writers, the law of nations was early incorporated as part of the law of the United States.

In his letter asking me to make the opening address this morning, the secretary of the Society describes the topic as “ The Second Hague Conference and the Development of International Law as a Science.”

There is certainly nothing small and narrow about this text for a discourse, while at first blush it would seem to be made up of two parts not particularly related. Any impression of that sort is dispelled, however, by a little reflection.

The aftermath of military conflict can be an occasion for transforming politics and society. In postwar Europe, aided by the Marshall Plan, statesmen such as Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer rebuilt the smoking ruins of an international conflict into an economic community with a strong democratic ethos, a common political identity, and a workable social balance. The old rivalries of the continent were abated by joint-security commitments, and the sense of Europe as a political space was strengthened by the human rights standards of the Helsinki process.

By way of introduction, I have certain preliminary comments which may be enlightening and provide for a sharper focus on the issues here. I wish to confess that I am an expolitical criminal, and I have not been rehabilitated. I have not been rehabilitated because I have never been caught, so the system never got a chance to rehabilitate me. As a youngster I plastered prohibited posters on the walls of the ancient cities of the Middle East. In my later youth I smuggled prohibited literature into socialist countries. And later yet I saw what I was not supposed to see, and talked to people I was not supposed to talk to, in fascist countries. So consequently I do have a special interest and a feeling for this business of political crime and terror.

It has been observed that the international development effort is a form of secular religion. If this is so, we can say that the salvation it aspires to is the realization of human rights. Thus it is no surprise that the doctrine and dogma of development work, appearing in the secular guise of “theory” and “policy,” are intimately concerned with the problem of the relationship between economic development and the ultimate goal of human rights.