David Scheffer was the lawyer appointed by Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. to design the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  He was the fixer whose task was to create a political court that would legitimise American and NATO military aggression in the Balkans, convicting their enemies while conveniently ignoring their own war crimes.

The ICTY was a wholly illegal ad hoc court that radically reinvented international justice making up new laws to suit itself- something it had been prohibited from doing by the U.N. The tribunal was explicitly instructed to only implement existing international law.

In this video – a masterclass in bloviating obfuscation – Scheffer seeks to persuade law students it’s time to dump the long-established Nuremberg principles in favour of a new, much broader, catch-all category of ‘atrocity crimes’ – covering everything from genocide in war or peacetime to crimes against humanity.

This he claims will make it easier for politicians to act promptly to fight evil and prevent human suffering rather than having to wait for crimes to be specifically identified . Judges, he argues, can figure out the precise nature of the crimes later. This approach builds on the injustice of The Hague tribunal and is deeply prejudicial- a fundamental breach of due process which presumes guilt for unspecified crimes.

What Scheffer sought and achieved with the ICTY was a smokescreen behind which laws established through proper democratic processes were torn up in favour of new laws invented not to protect humanity but to further the interests and ambitions of his political masters.

 

The moment the Security Council had set up the tribunal the U.N. renounced all responsibility for it and allowed the United States to take full control. The triumph of  ‘Victor’s Justice’ was assured.