The Holocaust Survivor Who Put His Faith in War Crimes Law

[Passages]

Theodor Meron’s advice on charging Israeli and Hamas leaders comes at the end of a remarkable and revealing career


Shachar Pinsker is a professor of Judaic studies and Middle East studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

July 9, 2024

On May 20, 2024, Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced that he had requested warrants for Hamas and Israeli leaders in what he described as “a historic step for victims.” The warrants are for Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas; and for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of Israel. Khan is charging the Hamas leaders with murder, rape and taking captives during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, when armed men under their command infiltrated from Gaza, killed an estimated 1,200 people and abducted approximately 240. He is charging the Israeli leaders with using starvation as a weapon of warfare and with intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population of Gaza, where the military has killed an estimated 35,000 people and injured 77,500. All parties are charged with committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Before making his announcement, Khan convened a panel of six experts in international law to analyze the evidence and assess whether it constituted “reasonable grounds to believe” that the suspects had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel and in Gaza. In a unanimous decision, the panel did indeed support the prosecutor’s decision. On May 20, the day Khan made his announcement, the Financial Times published an opinion piece authored by the six panel members in which they summarized their full report and described the war in Gaza as “perhaps unprecedented in the extent to which it has given rise to misunderstandings about the ICC’s role and jurisdiction, a particularly fractured discourse and, in some contexts, even antisemitism and Islamophobia.” Against this background, continued the expert advisers, they “felt [they] had a duty to accept the invitation to provide an impartial and independent legal opinion based on evidence.”

One of the expert panelists who co-authored the report and the Financial Times article is 94-year-old Theodor Meron, a renowned scholar of international and humanitarian law and a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned for four years in a Nazi concentration camp. During the early part of his career, the polymath Meron was a practicing attorney, a diplomat and an ambassador representing the state of Israel. Since the late 1970s, when he left Israel and relocated to New York, he has been a professor of international law, a judge and a scholar of human rights law.

In the latter capacities he has taught at New York University Law School, where he holds the Charles L. Denison chair; he has also been a visiting professor at Harvard, University of California, Berkeley, and, most recently, Oxford. Meron’s legal scholarship is fundamental to contemporary international law. In 2001 he was appointed as a judge on the U.N. panel that dealt with the crimes committed during the wars that broke out after the breakup of Yugoslavia, followed by a stint of several years as president of the tribunal’s appeals court.
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-holocaust-survivor-who-put-his-faith-in-war-crimes-law/



Early life
Meron was born in Kalisz, Poland, to a Jewish family. Meron was held in a Nazi labor camp during World War II. In 1945, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. He received his legal education at the Hebrew University (M.J.), Harvard Law School (LL.M., J.S.D.) and Cambridge University (Diploma in Public International Law). He immigrated to the United States in 1978 and is a citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Meron