Rafał Lemkin

This article is an attempt to answer the question of whether it is legally possible to establish an international criminal tribunal for crimes of the Soviet regime – a conditional «Nuremberg-2» – and if so, what may be its powers and jurisdiction. In order to outline some of the necessary preconditions for the above considerations, the analysis and the list of the most important mechanisms of the international law aimed at combating the impunity of those guilty of the most serious crimes – international crimes is carried out. This section also presents the context of legal and political restrictions on the use of criminal law mechanisms as part of a policy of reckoning with the communist (Soviet) past in Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis of several examples of attempts of conviction presented in this study, within the framework of the national legal systems of individual countries in the region of the most serious crimes of the Soviet regime, including the crime of genocide, provides an opportunity to formulate a thesis on the importance of settling the totalitarian past for individual countries of Central and Eastern Europe – first of all, in order to deal with the historical injustice, rehabilitate the victims and finally tell the world its true history, not distorted by the propaganda and misinformation policies of the past used by the Kremlin authorities to this day. This section uses research methods specific to the legal sciences (in particular, international law), that is, the analytical-comparative method, the theoretical-legal method and – to a limited extent – the dogmatic method.

The aim of the paper is to present excerpts of an interview with Dr. Alexander Korb held at the offices of the Museum of Genocide Victims on July 25, 2019. During an hour long interview, the interlocutors discussed the analytical applicability of the term genocide, similarities and differences between regional and international historiography regarding the scientific interpretations of the intentions and plans of the Ustasha movement, but also other topics equally important to the regional scientific community - critical assessment of German and Italian sources, the potential benefits of comparative approach to Jasenovac's research as well as Banate of Croatia and its role in the dynamics of genocide development in the Independent State of Croatia. The excerpts from the interview, in English, are supplemented with accompanying comments and explanations in appropriate places by the author.

This is the PDF-PowerPoint I used for the contribution I exposed during the IV International Scientific-Methodological Seminar MYTHOLOGEMS OF LAW: IRRATIONAL IN LAW - Kutafin Moscow State Law University, December 3, 2021. The title of my contribution was: 'The concept of cosmopolitan rights'.

A young law student living in Poland followed a legal case in Germany that caused him to worry. One fine day in !921 an Armenian shot and killed the Turkish former Minister of Foreign Affairs Talat Pasa. During his trial he argued that Pasa was responsible for the deaths of all his family. He proved that this was true but because there were no laws that made it illegal for a government to execute people (in this case the mass death of 1.5 armenians...) he was let off on grounds of insanity. For Lemkin this was the beginning of his investigation into the practices of an up and coming German, none other than Adolf Hitler. By the late thirties he told his whole family that Hitler was about to exterminate the jews, one of the first to predict this. He left for America before his whole family was also exterminated... in America he defined exactly what  it meant for a government to kill its own people and gave legal definition to the word he invented Genos from the Greek "race" and "cide" from the Latin for act of killing. Through much work he succeeded in getting the last German at Nuremburg trials to be accused of Genocide (the previous ones were accused of war crimes....)

Rafał Lemkin's genocide ban and the eliminationism of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. An attempt to redefine the theory of mass murder?

[PL] Zjawisko masowych eksterminacji towarzyszy ludzkości od zarania dziejów. Jednakże dopiero w początkach XX wieku rozpoczęto badania nad tym prawnym i politycznym fenomenem. Analiza przeprowadzona przez Rafała Lemkina doprowadziła do sformułowania pierwszej koncepcji ludobójstwa w 1944 roku, którą autor postulował uwzględnić w przyszłej międzynarodowej kodyfikacji. Dopiero w 2009 roku Daniel Jonah Goldhagen zaproponował nowe ujęcie ludobójstwa w ramach teorii eliminacjonizmu. Z punktu widzenia prawa uniwersalnego cenne jest nie tylko przedstawienie i porównanie tych idei, ale również wskazanie brakujących w nich, z prawnego punktu widzenia, elementów. Nie bez znaczenia jest kontynuacja refleksji nad udoskonalaniem, regulującego tak doniosłą materię, prawa międzynarodowego. [ENG] "The Raphael Lemkin’s concept of genocide and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s eliminationism. The attempt to redefine the theory of mass murders?": The mass extermination accompanied mankind since the dawn of history. However, it was in the early twentieth century, when the studies on the legal and political phenomenon started. Raphael Lemkin’s analysis led to the formulation of the first concept of the genocide in 1944, which was proposed to be included in a future international codification. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen suggested in 2009 a new approach towards the genocide in the framework of the theory of eliminationism. It is valuable from the universal law point of view not only to present and compare abovementioned ideas, but also to indicate their deficiencies. Not without significance is continuation the reflections on improvement of, regulating such an important matter, international law.

Przedmiotem moich rozważań będzie próba odpowiedzi na pytanie, jakie były wartości i motywy, kierujące pierwszym ze wspomnianych prawników, czyli Rafałem Lemkinem. Ich zrozumienie utrudnia fakt, że często z perspektywy późniejszych doświadczeń życiowych motywy działań ulegają mitologizacji, opisywane są jako logiczna i konsekwentna droga, prowadząca od wczesnych lat życia do realizacji wyznaczonego wówczas celu. Tak też działo się w przypadku Lemkina.