A Tribute Paid to Reason

The Special Court for Sierra Leone stands on a hill overlooking the ragged cityscape of Freetown. UN soldiers in dark sunglasses guard the thick concrete walls that surround the court, shielding it from the impoverished and war-ravaged streets below. Just six years ago, rebel fighters carved their way through these neighbourhoods, leaving thousands of corpses, burning houses, and hacked-off limbs in their wake. It took three years for UN and British troops to strong-arm the militants into a peace agreement. Today, Sierra Leoneans can visit the Special Court and study the impassive faces of the men charged with orchestrating the war and its atrocities.

On the first day of the trials, David Crane stepped to the podium to explain why the accused men deserved the censure of all humanity. Throughout his opening address to the blackrobed judges, Crane felt an invisible presence at his side. “It was eerie,” he later told me. “I felt that Robert Jackson was standing right next to me.” Jackson, who led the prosecution of twenty-two Nazi leaders at the end of World War II during the famed trials in Nuremberg, Germany, was the only other American to have acted as chief prosecutor of an international war-crimes tribunal. On a shelf in his office, Crane kept a memoir of the Nuremberg trials, bookmarked to the page with Jackson’s opening address. That historic speech began:



Before he came to Sierra Leone, Crane was the deputy inspector-general of the US defence department. In the corner of his Freetown office sat a large wooden carving of a swooping eagle with a snake in its talon. The statue screamed “American justice.” Indeed, the United States has done more than any other country to spur the war-crime trials that have appeared in the last fifteen years, beginning with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and now tribunals for Rwanda and Sierra Leone, and (likely) Cambodia and East Timor.

“Nuremberg is the foundation stone for what we are doing here in Sierra Leone, as well as the courts for Yugoslavia and elsewhere,” says Crane, who stepped down as chief prosecutor this July. “And the culmination of the Nuremberg movement is the International Criminal Court (icc).”

But as Crane well knows, his own government is a stalwart opponent of the icc, and many consider his country a rogue state when it comes to international law. Around the world, the legality of the Iraq invasion is still being debated, and there is a broad consensus that the American military has subverted or ignored the Geneva Conventions, from Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo Bay. All this points to a paradox in contemporary international relations: as we mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Nuremberg trials, the United States is both a great champion of the Nuremberg legacy and its most powerful adversary.

On weekdays, a desultory parade of accused murderers, thieves, and other criminals appears in Courtroom 600 of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. But on this Sunday evening in July, the court is empty except for a German television crew and an impatient American. “Come on, make it quick, I’m on the fly, I’m in demand,” Ben Ferencz says in mock exasperation while the Germans fiddle with a boom microphone.

Ferencz, an eighty-five-year-old New Yorker with a vaudeville impresario’s patter, once stood in this room and accused twenty-two men of killing more than a million civilians, mostly Jews. He was the chief prosecutor in what press reports called the biggest murder trial in history—the trial of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis’ mobile killing squads.

Courtroom 600 is an elegant room with two-tiered crystal chandeliers, sombre wood panelling, and windows smothered with heavy velvet drapes. Over the entryways are green marble arches with statuettes of Adam and Eve, the scales of justice, and, most conspicuously, a bust of Medusa, her hair a writhing mass of serpents and her mouth frozen in a silent shriek.

The room looks nearly the same as it did in 1945. There, sitting in the prisoner’s dock near the Medusa arch, Nazi Germany’s leaders declared themselves nicht schuldig of launching an illegal war that cost over fifty million lives. Here, in front of the judge’s bench, prosecutors stood at a temporary lectern and proved that the Germans had slaughtered millions of Jewish civilians. At the back of the room, a pack of more than 160 journalists—at that point the largest press gallery in history—watched the test run of this new tactic in international relations: powerful men, leaders of their nation, being held legally responsible for wartime atrocities.