“War between nations was renounced by the signatories of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty. This means that it has become throughout practically the entire world an illegal thing. Hereafter, when nations engage in armed conflict, either one or both of them must be termed violators of this general treaty law.... We denounce them as law breakers."
Henry Stimson, USA Secretary of State 1932
The horrors of the First World War were such that statesmen were determined to end warfare once and for all. The General Treaty for the Renunciation of War was signed in 1928 and eventually ratified by 62 States including France, America, Britain, Germany, Japan and Italy. It became known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact after its main proponents the American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and France’s foreign minister Aristide Briand. This was the first treaty prohibiting the waging of war and it formed the legal basis for the convictions of Germany’s leaders at Nuremburg after World War II.
In 1945 The United Nations was founded to eliminate warfare, promote human rights, uphold justice and international treaties and advance the economic and social interests of humankind. One of its first actions was to set up an International Law Commission to draw up statute war laws based on the judgments of the Nuremburg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals. In 1950 the General Assembly accepted the Commission’s proposals and enacted seven new war laws to be known as the Nuremburg Principles. In 1948 the Genocide Convention was enacted, to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust and ensure that no-one would ever again attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. But for the persistence of Senator William Proxmire the USA might never have ratified this law, but eventually in 1988 under President Reagan the Genocide Convention Implementation Act [The Proxmire Act] became law in America.
The fifty year period after the signing of the Genocide Convention saw the signing of several important war laws with additions to the Geneva Conventions, a treaty outlawing torture, conventions governing the manufacture, trading and use of chemical, biological and toxin weapons; and in 1998 the world outlawed the use of landmines. In 2002 with the ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the world’s first international law enforcement authority was set up in The Hague with jurisdiction over the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Although the world community has made strenuous efforts to outlaw war, it encounters great difficulty in enforcing the law. National leaders tend to ignore and violate war law as and when it suits their interests. Only when a leader of a major nation is convicted of war crimes in court will the world be in a position to eradicate warfare and armed conflict once and for all.
