Professor Stahn discusses historic legacy of ICTY on Genocide at Nuremberg
On Saturday 6 May 2017, Professor Stahn discussed the legacy of the ICTY on the crime of genocide in Courtroom 600 at Nuremberg.
The presentation was part of an expert conference on the ‘Legacy of ICTY and the Nuremberg Principles’, organized by the Nuremberg Principles Academy and the ICTY as part of the legacy events of the tribunal. Stahn argued that the ICTY jurisprudence emancipated the understanding of genocide from the model of the Holocaust.
Throughout much of the 20th century, the 1948 Genocide Convention was like ‘new car’ that did not leave the garage. The jurisprudence of the ICTY clarified that genocide is not a game of numbers. Stahn highlighted three transformative moments: the Jelisic case, with its focus on a subjective interpretation of the crime, the Krstic case, which recognized Srebrenica as genocide despite its limited geographic spread and its focus on a part of a sub-group, and Tolimir which recognized that forced transfers of population are not necessarily incompatible with genocidal intent. He concluded that the word genocide is likely to exceed its narrow legal meaning, despite the important footsteps made in the past 25 years.