Calling Genocide by Its Name Is Not a Weaponization of Peace

I find it telling that, upon the announcement of a peace prize for a jurist long employed in courts of justice, the loudest cry is that the award is a “grotesque weaponization.” The woman so honoured, Navi Pillay, is praised by the committee for a career spent in defence of human dignity, for sitting in international criminal tribunals, for serving as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, and for chairing a commission of inquiry into the occupied Palestinian territory. That commission has concluded that the state of Israel has committed genocidal acts in Gaza, with a specific intent to destroy the people there. The response from some quarters has not been to answer the charge, but to curse the judge.

When I wrote in the Second Treatise that political power is only a right to make laws “for the regulating and preserving of property,” I meant property in the wide sense: lives, liberties, and estates. Power is held on trust, for that end and no other. Men are by nature free and equal; any claim that some may rightly command the lives and fortunes of others must be justified, not presumed. Reason, which is the law of nature, teaches us that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. A law or policy that does so, not as an unintended and repaired excess, but as its very bent and purpose, is no law; it is mere force dressed in the forms of law.

Here the commission, established by a body of nations, has examined the conduct of a state in Gaza and has named it the crime of genocide, and has further said that leading officers of that state have incited the commission of that crime. I do not possess the evidence they saw, and I cannot in honesty pronounce upon the truth of their factual conclusion. But I can say this: if their finding is grounded in sober inquiry, and if the destruction they describe was indeed pursued with the intent they allege, then the trust on which all civil government rests has been broken. A people cannot be said to have consented to their own extermination, nor can any prior wrongs against a state license it to disregard the basic rule that one man may not, to secure himself, ruin another who has done him no wrong by any known law.

Some object that to call such acts “genocide” and to honour the judge who so concludes is to turn institutions of peace into engines of partisanship. Yet what are courts for, if not to judge between parties who each claim right on their side? When Volker Türk praises the prize as a reaffirmation that human rights, the rule of law, justice, and accountability are fundamental to peace, he speaks a simple truth: peace without judgment is but a pause between violences. The fear that law will be “weaponized” generally proceeds from those already in possession of the sharper weapons. They prefer, in disputes that touch their own conduct, either no judge at all, or a judge of their choosing – in other words, to be judge in their own case.

It is said also that sanctions have been imposed upon an international criminal court, and that Pillay herself is denounced as a font of lies and hatred. Here the pattern grows clearer. When a magistrate exceeds his authority, the people may resist; but when a court, properly constituted, pursues those who are accused of the gravest crimes, and the response is to cripple the court itself, we see not resistance to tyranny but protection of prerogative. Prerogative, I have argued, is a power to act for the public good without a rule; it may in emergencies be necessary. But once it is turned to shielding rulers from any impartial judgment of their actions, it ceases to be prerogative and becomes plain usurpation. To strike at the tribunal because one fears its sentence is to dissolve, in that respect, the very government of laws one pretends to defend.

I do not deny that international arrangements are imperfect, or that those who sit in judgment may, like all men, err and carry their own prejudices. No human institution will apply the law of nature without blemish. Yet the alternative is not some pure and orderly peace, spoiled only by meddling judges. The alternative is that each state keeps the power of life and death over any within its reach, answerable to no one but itself and, at last, to God alone. In such a world every people lives nearer the state of nature, but worse off than in nature, because they face, not scattered individual injuries, but organized force unrestrained by any acknowledged common rule. If the choice is between fallible tribunals and no tribunals, reason and experience both side with the former.

Those who complain of the prize given to Pillay may persuade the world by another way. Let them submit the commission’s work to public examination. Let them lay forth contrary evidence, in sober detail. Let them use the very instruments of law which they claim have been profaned. If, instead, they heap scorn upon the person, denounce the institution as “rogue,” and seek to starve it of means, they reveal that their quarrel is less with error than with accountability itself. When I spoke of a “long train of abuses” tending to the same end, I had in view the steady narrowing of any path by which the injured may obtain an impartial hearing. Where that path is closed, the appeal to heaven begins anew.

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