Lloyd Axworthy is a former Canadian foreign minister and is chair of the World Refugee and Migration Council.
As Russian atrocities in Ukraine compound, the debate over how to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin and his accomplices accountable for their crimes is mounting amongst international-law experts and government policy makers.
Missing from that discourse is a recognition of a striking irony: Our modern concept of international criminal law derives largely from the work of two lawyers from Lviv, Ukraine. Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin are the originators of the concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide, which have influenced the creation of tribunals and courts in which prosecution for these international crimes can take place.
This important history – so relevant today – is brilliantly recounted in the 2016 book East West Street by Philippe Sands, an international human-rights lawyer who was involved in the celebrated prosecution of Augusto Pinochet, former president of Chile, and other cases before the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Mr. Sands describes the unique circumstances in which Lauterpacht and Lemkin, both born at the turn of the 20th century, lived on the same street in Lwow (Lviv), attended the same law school with the same professor and were both forced to flee their city because of rising antisemitism in the 1930s. They subsequently became instrumental in laying the foundation for our present-day commitment to international justice for political and military leaders who willfully commit violence against civilians.
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