Rosalie Silberman Abella is the Samuel and Judith Pisar Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada from 2004 until her mandatory retirement in 2021. The following piece was adapted from her keynote address to the American Society of International Law in Washington in April.
We’re at the edge of a future unlike any I’ve seen in my lifetime. The extremes have occupied the middle and the middle is polluted by bombastic and demagogic incivility from the extremes. We became persuaded that humility and respect for differences required us to accept the legitimacy of regimes that did not share our views about democracy, human rights and justice. We ignored the moral legacies of the Second World War.
Elie Wiesel said: “Nuremberg is the story of those who did the killing … Nuremberg is also the story of those who did nothing.” My formative years were spent in the shadow of the Nuremberg trials. I was born in a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany, in July, 1946, the same month the prosecution summed up its case in the Trial of the Major War Criminals. I came to Canada in 1950 with my parents, younger sister and grandmother a few months after the trials ended.
By 1949 it was all over. No more Nuremberg trials, no more Nazi war crimes prosecutions anywhere in the Western world for two decades, and the early release of many convicted war criminals who had been sentenced at Nuremberg. The past was tucked away, and the moral comfort of the Nuremberg trials gave way to the amoral expedience of the Cold War.
And so, the vitriolic language and venal rights abuses, unrestrained by anyone’s conscience anywhere, in or out of Germany, turned into the ultimate rights abuse: genocide.