The Inaugural Benjamin B. Ferencz Essay Competition

The Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute is pleased to announce the launch of the Benjamin B. Ferencz Essay Competition in honor of former Nuremberg Prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz.

As a war crimes investigator during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, Ferencz gathered evidence of Nazi atrocities in preparation for trials by U.S. Military Commissions. After the war, he was recruited by Telford Taylor, an associate of Justice Robert Jackson, who had been appointed Chief of Counsel for a dozen subsequent proceedings at Nuremberg.  Ferencz soon became the Chief Prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen Case, in which 22 defendants were convicted for the brutal murder of more than a million innocent men, women and children. He was 27 years old at the time.

Deadline: 31 August, 2012, at 5:00 PM (Central Daylight Time)

Eligibility:

• Contestants must be 20 years of age or older.
• Contestants must have completed their high school studies. Law students, PhD students and young scholars are especially invited to apply.

Essay Question

The essay must address the following question:  Under what conditions may acts that constitute illegal use of armed force and that result in the widespread or systematic attack upon a civilian population be prosecuted as crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, pursuant to the Rome Statute.

Contestants are encouraged to consider the following and develop the arguments set forth in the description below:

In June 2010, a conference took place in Kampala, Uganda, to review the Statute that had been adopted in Rome to govern the International Criminal Court (ICC). It was agreed that the new Court would exercise jurisdiction over “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.” Four categories of crimes were identified in article 5 of the Statute as falling within this jurisdiction: the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. However, the Court could only exercise its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression after a number of conditions had been fulfilled. One of the primary goals of the Review Conference in Kampala was to consider amending the Statute to add a definition of the crime of aggression and thereby close the gap in the ICC’s jurisdiction. When the Kampala conference ended, a definition of aggression was adopted by consensus, now found in article 8 bis of the Rome Statute, but implementation of that definition was postponed until, at the earliest, 2017, meaning that the Court could not exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression until after that time.  Thus, what the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945 had condemned as “the supreme international crime” cannot currently be prosecuted at the ICC.

Article 7 of the Rome Statute sets forth a definition of crimes against humanity, and lists as predicate acts, among others, “murder,” “torture,” “enslavement,” “rape” and “other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health” (Article 7(1)(k)). No prior Security Council approval is required for prosecution of crimes against humanity assuming jurisdiction exists under article 13(a) or (c) of the Statute. Intent and knowledge are essential elements that must be proved, and pursuant to article 30(2), a person is deemed to have intent in relation to a consequence where either that person “means to cause that consequence or is aware that it will occur in the ordinary course of events.”

Thus, the question arises whether individuals responsible for the illegal use of armed force, knowing that their actions will result in the killing of large numbers of civilians, may be held accountable for crimes against humanity under the spirit and letter of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Writing Guidelines

• The essay should take the form of a law review style article. 
• Submissions must be original and unpublished works of under 6,000 words, including footnotes.
• Footnotes must conform to authoritative standard rules of legal citation and must include a description of each authority adequate to allow a reasonable reader to identify and locate the authority in a publication of general circulation.
• The essay must be typed and double-spaced.