Ambassador Stephen Rapp delivers remarks at the Ceremony of Grateful Remembrance for Benjamin Ferencz and Justice Thomas Buergenthal at The Peace Palace, The Hague, The Netherlands. June 2, 2024. —Photo courtesy of Donna Maier
On June 2, 2024, Ambassador Stephen Rapp delivered remarks at the Ceremony of Grateful Remembrance for Benjamin Ferencz and Justice Thomas Buergenthal at The Peace Palace, The Hague, The Netherlands.
It is wonderful to be here with friends to share three-minute personal memories of these two great men .
I chose one from when Ben and Tom were together in Delray Beach, Florida, in January 2017, for the first advisory group meeting of the Ferencz International Justice Initiative that Ben had endowed at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide—in support of which I continue to serve.
The result of the discussion that day was the launch of an initiative to empower the victims and survivors of present-day atrocities to marshal the evidence and to build the alliances—north and south, east and west—like Ben and Tom did all their lives, to enable these survivors to bring cases before legitimate courts, and as Ben did in his opening at in the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg, make the “plea of humanity to law.”
This led to formation of victims’ action groups in multiple conflict zones, including the survivors of atrocities perpetrated by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by Da’esh in northern Iraq, by the Tatmadaw in Myanmar, by the brutal militias deployed by political leaders against civilians of ethnicities supporting their opponents in South Sudan. The participants were brought together across continents to learn lessons from each other and received continuing support to open new pathways to justice.
The goal, as Ben said at Nuremberg, was not vengeance, but “international penal action affirming man's right to live in peace and dignity regardless of race or creed.”
This meant overcoming challenges, as Ben did at Nuremberg. Because so often these are not crimes against a state or its sovereignty, authority, or agreements, but against humanity itself, against our rights as humans, the further legal protection of which was the great cause of Tom Buergenthal’s life: rights that must be defended against those Justice Jackson called “men who possess themselves of great power” and who Ben described as those with “responsibility or command [who] assumed the right to decide the fate of men.”
Ben and Tom opened pathways to justice. We owe it to them to continue that work, no matter what the obstacles, and to support and protect all those who are cutting that path.
Ambassador Stephen J. Rapp is the Simon-Skjodt Center's Tom A. Bernstein Genocide Prevention Fellow, where he advises and liaises on behalf of the Center with governments, legal teams, victims groups, and key individuals to help advance justice and accountability in Syria.