Benjamin B. Ferencz

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Benjamin Berell^[1] Ferencz (b. March 11, 1920)^[2]^[3] is an American lawyer. He was an investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the Chief Prosecutor for the United States Army at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, one of the twelve military trials held by the U.S. authorities at Nuremberg, Germany. Later, he became a vocal advocate of the establishment of an international rule of law and of an International Criminal Court. From 1985 to 1996, he was Adjunct Professor of International Law at Pace University.

He was born in Transylvania, from where his family immigrated into the United States when he was ten months old. According to his own account, the family left Romania to evade the persecution of Hungarian Jews after Hungary had ceded the territory where they lived to Romania after World War I.^[4] The family settled in New York City, where they lived in the Lower East Side in Manhattan.^[5]

He studied crime prevention at the City College of New York and won a scholarship for the Harvard Law School with his criminal law exam. At Harvard, he studied under Roscoe Pound^[6] and also did research for Sheldon Glueck, who at that time was writing a book on war crimes. Ferencz was graduated from Harvard in 1943.^[7] After his studies, he joined the U.S. Army, where he served in the 115th AAA Gun Battalion, an anti-aircraft artillery battalion.^[5] In 1945, he was transferred to the headquarters of General Patton's Third Army, where he was assigned to a team tasked with setting up a war crimes branch and collecting evidence for such crimes. In this function, he was then sent to the concentration camps as they were liberated by the U.S. army.^[5]

On Christmas 1945^[6], Ferencz was honorably discharged from the Army with the rank of Sergeant. He returned to New York, but was recruited only a few weeks later to participate as a prosecutor in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials in the legal team of Telford Taylor. Taylor appointed him Chief Prosecuter in the Einsatzgruppen Case—Ferencz's first case.^[5] All of the 22 men on trial were convicted; 14 of them received death sentences, of which four were eventually carried out.

Ferencz stayed in Germany after the Nuremberg Trials, together with his wife Gertrude,^[5] whom he had married in New York^[8] on March 31, 1946.^[2] He participated in the setup of reparation and rehabilitation programs for the victims of persecutions by the Nazis, and also had a part in the negotiations that led to the Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany signed on September 10, 1952^[9] and the first German Restitution Law in 1953.^[5] In 1957, the family—they had four children by then—returned to the U.S., where Ferencz entered private law practice^[8] as a partner of Telford Taylor.^[10]

But the experiences made just after World War II left a defining impression on Ferencz.^[8] After thirteen years, and under the impression of the events of the Vietnam War, Ferencz left the private law practice and henceforth worked for the institution of an International Criminal Court that would serve as a world-wide highest instance for issues of crimes against humanity and war crimes.^[8] He also published several books on this subject. Already in his first book published in 1975, entitled Defining International Aggression-The Search for World Peace, he argued for the establishment of such an international court.^[7] From 1985 to 1996, Ferencz also worked as an Adjunct Professor of International Law at Pace University at White Plains, New York.^[11]

An International Criminal Court was indeed established on July 1, 2002, when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court entered in force. The U.S. did sign the treaty, but did not subsequently ratify it, and furthermore concluded a large number of bilateral agreements with other states that would exclude U.S. citizens from being brought before the ICC.^[12]

Ferencz has repeatedly argued against this procedure and suggested that the U.S. simply join the ICC without reservations, as it was a long-established rule of law that "law must apply equally to everyone", also in an international context.^[8] In this vein, he has suggested in an interview given on August 25, 2006, that not only Saddam Hussein should be tried, but also George W. Bush because the Iraq War had been begun by the U.S. without permission by the UN Security Council.^[13]

[edit] Selected bibliography

Ferencz, B.: New Legal Foundations for Global Survival: Security Through the Security Council, Oceana 1994; ISBN 0379212072.
Ferencz, B.; Keyes, K. Jr: Planethood, Vision Books 1988. Reprint 1991; ISBN 0915972212.
Ferencz, B.: A Common Sense Guide to World Peace, Oceana 1985.
Ferencz, B.: Enforcing International Law: A Way to World Peace, Oceana 1983.
Ferencz, B.: Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation, Harvard 1979. Reprint 2002, Indiana University Press & USHMM; ISBN 0253215307.
Ferencz, B.: An International Criminal Court: A Step Toward World Peace, Oceana 1980. ISBN 0379203898.
Ferencz, B.: Defining International Aggression: The Search for World Peace, Oceana 1975. ISBN 037900271X.