'The Politics of Justice' - article on successful HAC conference

'As a rabbit or as a duck?'

On 12 and 13 October, as part of our 60-year Lustrum events, together with colleagues of the Hague Academic Coalition, the International Institute of Social Studies organized the 9th Annual From Peace to Justice Conference.

Entitled 'The Politics of Justice: From Human Rights Revolution to Global Justice', and addressed by Professor Martti Koskenniemi as keynote speaker, the event attracted a very large number of lawyers and non-lawyers.

Several participants tweeted about the event. Furthermore, the widely read Dutch lawyers’ magazine Mr. published an article about the event.

The original text of the article is available here. We provide a translation:

Monday, 15 October 2012, Mr. Magazine

You are trapped in irrelevance! Such an allegation is not pleasant for anyone to hear, but it was a tantalizing beginning of a two-day conference on The Politics of Justice, that took place last weekend. More than 300 participants – staff of embassies, international organizations, the Yugoslavia tribunal, the International Criminal Court and especially a large number of(foreign) academics – came together to discuss the strained relationship between international law and politics.

The conference was organized by the Hague Academic Coalition (HAC), a partnership of eight research institutes based in The Hague. One of them, the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) is celebrating its sixty year anniversary and acted as host. The Institute, based on the Kortenaerkade in The Hague, a former PTT building, was cheerfully decorated with giant red bows.

The famous Koskenniemi

Lawyers believe that law is objective, but should rather be aware of how significant the role of politics is. Otherwise, they face a risk of becoming trapped inirrelevance; so argued Jeff Handmaker, aptly summarizing what the Finnish Professor Martti Koskenniemi argued twenty years ago in his seminal article ‘The Politics of International Law’. Koskenniemi himself was present and passionately explained his position.

“They never look like you think they do”, whispered a young woman from the audience to her neighbor, when Koskenniemi took the podium. This authority in the field of Critical Legal Studies is small, thin and blond, but his rhetoric and matching arm gestures were powerful. “It is clear why we need the law”, he explained. “We do not want the UN (oops! I said that out loud?), we do not want a situation where the international community intervenes in countries where it sees a ‘need’. Such an intervention should be based on something. Hence, we need objective rules. But, objective rules are obviously stupid rules. Suppose you should only intervene if 500 people are killed … then dictators would feel free to murder 499 people! It is clear that intervention in other situations should also be possible, if it is truly ‘necessary’. But wait, we wanted to dispense with that term [“necessity”]?"

As you can see in the picture, there are two animals to be discovered, but you never can see them simultaneously; lawyers sometimes speak the rabbit-language of politics, then the duck-language of objective law, but never the two together, argues Koskenniemi. The audience responded with divided opinions. An employee of the ICTY argued strongly that professional attention was given to the political context of crimes they were prosecuting. During the coffee break, some even called the words of the Finnish professor ‘nonsense’.

Energy

Koskenniemi, however, has many supporters who heed his call for more attention to politics. As underlined by Vincent de Graaf (adviser to the High Commissioner for National Minorities of the OSCE) it is of great political importance that we take Russia’s human rights policy seriously. During workshops that followed, the relationship between international law and politics was explored more deeply.

All in all, it was not the most pleasant of subjects that the conference addressed: international crimes, the military intervention in Libya, the unending battle against corruption, etcetera. Nevertheless, all conference attendees had an energetic look in their eyes. After all, who doesn’t gain energy in a tightly organized conference where interesting things are spoken about?