Never Give Up!

Do you know the person on the picture? He is an honorable guest to any conference on international law and he has thousands of friends around the world. Please, meet Benjamin Ferencz.

Benjamin Ferencz was the official prosecutor during the Nuremberg trials in 1946-1948. We met the first time at a conference organized by the ICRC in 2009 in St. Petersburg. He was an honored guest, I moderated one of the sections. We spent all the evening talking. Since then, I have a pleasure to consider him being my friend. Many times he sent warm greetings to the events organized by me. This is a surprisingly open and a friendly person. Today I want to share his story, which I often tell my students. Ben himself shared it with me.

In 1943, he graduated from Harvard Law School and on a wave of patriotism, went to Europe, to fight on the second front. He was 24 years old. Ben participated in almost all the important battles of the Western Front and, finally, at the end of the war, was appointed to a special unit engaged in identification and consolidation of evidences of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Wehrmacht. In late 1945, as a sergeant, he returned to the US and became a lawyer.

However, thanks to the work that he had done in the army, he was invited to a group of American lawyers working in the prosecutor’s office in the so-called subsequent Nuremberg trials. In a natural but almost accidental sequence of circumstances, at his twenty-seven, he became the chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppe trial.

After the process he became very famous. Since then he has been fighting for peace. He was one of the first (in his book published in 1975) who suggested the creation of a permanent international criminal court (the International Criminal Court was founded on July 1, 2002). He still writes a lot and travels a lot, speaks at conferences. Last time we met in April 2017 at the conference of the oldest organization of international lawyers – American Society of International Law. Looking into the eyes of this short man, I always feel the strength of his spirit. He went through war. He built a career. And he devoted his life to the struggle for peace – a goal that seems unattainable for many of us, but which is inevitably closer thanks to people like Ben.

His stories – which he has hundreds – Benjamin Ferenc almost always ends in the same way: “There are three rules that need to be followed in order to be successful, in order to achieve any goal. I want to share them with you. Here they are. The first- never give up, the second – never give up, and the third – never give up! “. For me, these words sound like a refrain to the Nelson Mandela’s – “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” Find out more about Benjamin Ferencz here.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), established on the basis of the Rome Statute, is the first permanent international institution to prosecute, among others, war criminals. Today 123 out of 193 countries are already its participants. The court is designed to consider cases only with the consent of the state. However, it can deal with cases and use international pressure to enforce judgments against war criminals of any foreign state who committed war crimes on the territory of a State-party.