Few figures in international law have witnessed and influenced its development as much as Judge Theodor Meron. A Holocaust survivor who became a leading scholar, government legal adviser, diplomat and international judge, his unique reflections offer a first-hand account, built over decades of experience, of how international law is formed, interpreted, and applied under pressure.
I recently met with Judge Meron at his residence in Trinity College, Oxford, to discuss his memoir, A Thousand Miracles: From Surviving the Holocaust to Judging Genocide. In this interview, Meron, aged 96, reflects on the extraordinary experiences that shaped his commitment to justice, the discipline of applying the law free from politics, and his hope for the future of international justice.
_____________________________________________
Meron’s commitment to international law can be traced back to his childhood during the Second World War. As a young boy in Nazi-occupied Poland, his early years were characterised by the loss of his mother, brother and grandparents, as well as his home. “I was completely disconnected from people my age, growing up in a universe of adults focused on survival”. The loss which would most significantly shape Meron’s professional life, however, was that of an education. “For five years, I was taken out from any context which had a cultural dimension. I did not see a single book…that loss of culture, of learning – it was profound”.
When the war ended, he faced the daunting task of reconstructing his education almost from scratch. Smuggled out of communist Poland with the help of the Jewish Brigade, he arrived in what was then Mandatory Palestine, armed with what he calls “an abstract hunger for education”.
At that stage, the language of ‘international law’ had not entered his thinking. “I simply did not know about Nuremberg” he says, “Nuremberg was people in the West with access to radio, newspapers…my interest was growing from my experience”. He was particularly struck by the industrial scale of the Holocaust and its execution within a highly educated and informed society. “That such people could be such an easy target – it was shocking”. Meron, convinced that formal structures must exist to “create real obstacles” to evil actors, committed himself to the pursuit of international justice.
Convinced of his calling, Meron’s trajectory was swift. He completed his schooling in Haifa, entered the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, helped by what he humbly refers to as “strokes of luck”, found his way to Harvard Law School, which was the only one of eight institutions to accept his application. There, an intellectual shift occurred. Harvard’s Socratic method, with its emphasis on questioning and analysis, “suited me so much more”, he recalls. “You could give a completely wrong answer and still get a good grade if your analysis was original”. A fellowship at Cambridge followed, under the mentorship of Hersch Lauterpacht, and ultimately, he was invited by Shabtai Rosenne, former Legal Adviser at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to take up a legal position.
In contrast to the freedom Meron found through his studies, his early years in the Israeli Ministry were more constrained. Meron is frank about this tension, “I was the youngest and most junior person there” he says, “I would not typically be asked about my views on international law and the policy of the government. I would be given assignments and try to write something sensible”. Yet even within those limits, he came to articulate a view of the government lawyer’s role that would mark the rest of his career. Lawyers advising States, he insists, carry obligations that are closer to those of judges than private practitioners. Their task is not to tailor legal arguments to policy preferences, but to “call the law as they see it”.
This principle was tested early and publicly. In the aftermath of the Six Day War, Meron, still in his thirties and at that time posted to Israel’s Mission to the UN in New York, was unexpectedly elevated to Chief Legal Adviser at the Israeli Ministry. It was during this time that he was asked to give his now famous but then secret opinion on the legality of Israeli civilian settlements in the Occupied West Bank, the Golan Heights and Gaza.
Meron, as was later uncovered by journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg, had advised the Israeli Government that the establishment of civilian settlements in occupied territory violated the Fourth Geneva Convention. Recalling the government’s response to his advice, Meron says “I faced a determined and deliberate policy of ignoring me… They tried to accommodate me by following the fiction of establishing civilian settlements but calling them military outposts, but subsequently, nothing at all”. In the years that followed, Meron remained resolute. “I never thought that I should give an opinion which would make things more palatable for the government, cosmetically”.
Meron reflects on the criticism that the law – particularly international law – is an obstacle to policy-making and pragmatic political solutions. Quite the opposite, in his view.
“Take Palestine. Good legal principle would mean that measures taken by the occupying power are, by their very nature, temporary […] My opinion, in the long run, would have served significantly the possibility of accommodating conflicting Israeli and Arab interests; creating the infrastructure necessary for a two State solution”.
Meron notes that the Israeli Government did not penalise him for his opinion. Instead, he was offered a job to be Ambassador to Canada “which was not exactly Gulag”. But still, he missed the intellectual freedom of academia.
“In academia, you are not bound by civil service or government regulations, your universe is much more open” and “that gives you a tremendous possibility to influence policy”.
Subsequently, Meron spent several decades as a Professor at Harvard Law School, UC Berkeley, New York University, and the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies. He is currently an Honorary Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford University. Meron describes being an academic in Oxford as “a dream come true”, and upon joining him for lunch in the Senior Common Room, it is clear he is what the kids call a BNOC (Big Name on Campus). Meron even has his own room in the college – the Meron Room – with his judges’ robes hanging on the back of the door, his Order of St. Michael and St. George and Légion d’honneur behind glass, and pictures of his late wife, Monique, above the fireplace. Meron recalls Monique often; his steadfast supporter during their 43-year marriage. After her passing, Meron has found solace in writing poetry, with his latest book, Things I Dread, being both an homage to her and a way to process his life. Gracefully, Monique still has a home in the gardens of Trinity College – a Japanese Zelkowa tree planted by the college faculty in her memory.
Meron’s experience of academia was liberating after the institutional discipline of government service. That freedom, in turn, prepared him for what he describes as the most meaningful chapter of his life – his years as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where he served four terms as President, and three terms as President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT).
During this time, between 2002-2019, Meron contributed to some of the most significant decisions in international criminal law. He talks proudly of presiding over the first genocide case in post-WWII Europe (Krstic), and his role in the Kunarac appeal judgment, which progressed international jurisprudence on sexual violence and the definition of consent. However, Meron speaks candidly about the criticism he faced during his presidency; his tenure as President was marked by several divisive decisions, driven in part by his loyalty to principle and deliberately narrow approach to adjudication.
The function of an international criminal court, he insists, is often misunderstood. It is not to write history and it is not to promote reconciliation. Those may be desirable consequences; “we all want judgments to influence peace-making” and “a well-documented judgment presents an excellent display of the facts”. Indeed, he acknowledges the power of removing abusive actors from the scene for trial, noting that “the Dayton Agreement probably would never have been concluded if Karadzic had remained in such a state of influence”. But these positive consequences are not, he says, the function of a court. The function, he says, is simply “to provide a fair trial according to due process and the rule of law”.
This insistence on restraint has not always been popular. Meron speaks candidly about the criticism he faced following the Appeal Chamber’s decision to overturn the conviction of Croatian General, Ante Gotovina. The backlash, he recalls, came not only from sceptics of international justice but from its most committed supporters who assumed that “the high-profile nature of the case meant it must result in conviction”. Meron preferred to not address the criticism, letting his judgments speak for themselves. “I have always believed that the only answer I can produce is to tell people, read my judgment, that is the sum total of what I think about the subject”.
Meron notes that parts of the appeal judgment were later vindicated in the Croatia v Serbia (Genocide Convention) proceedings before the International Court of Justice and he maintains that despite the 3-2 split, “there was unanimous recognition that the Trial Chamber was wrong…there were basic things [they] took liberty with”. But the consequences were considerable. “For several years” he says, “I was the whipping boy of international lawyers”.
Despite the difficulty of this time, and the thick skin he claims to have never acquired, Meron remains steadfast in how “absolutely essential it is for a judge to exclude all extraneous agendas”. Looking back at my life, he says, “the most creative, the most worthwhile, was my nearly two decades on international courts”. “I’m lucky” he says, “because, while people may disagree with me, for example on the Palestine issue, I’m regarded as a sort of fanatic of justice in the principled way”.
As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Meron about the future of international justice. In an era of shifting global alliances and increased distrust of multilateralism, what comes next? Meron is characteristically hopeful. We are, he says “in a very, very bad stage now for international criminal justice [but] international humanitarian law and international criminal law have never developed in a straight line”. He refers to periods of regression followed by reform, often catalysed by atrocity. “Take the American Civil War – very cruel, very brutal – but it created the Lieber Code, which influenced later, the Hague Conventions on Land Warfare. Take the Battle of Solferino, which led to the establishment of the ICRC, which led to the Geneva Conventions”. He believes in the resilience of international courts and tribunals, pointing to the International Criminal Court which, despite US sanctions on the Prosecutor, Deputy Prosecutors and numerous judges, has continued to function and even confirm charges against ex-President of The Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte. “There have been ups and downs, and this is probably natural for evolution of a body of law. Those ups and downs have happened in the past; they will happen again, but I’m hopeful”.
We agree it is fitting to end our discussion on that optimistic note, bringing our interview to a close. Meron wishes me well at the Porter’s Lodge before turning to cross the campus gardens, passing Monique’s tree, and heading toward the historic university that has proudly embraced him in as part of its legacy. I find myself thinking of the students there who are fortunate to benefit from his 96 years of wisdom and experience, as he continues to inspire the next generation of international lawyers to put principle before politics, to have the moral courage to do what is right, and to believe that justice, if evenly applied, can end the cycle of atrocity crimes.
From Survival to Justice: A Conversation with Judge Theodor Meron
Written by Kate HamiltonFew figures in international law have witnessed and influenced its development as much as Judge Theodor Meron. A Holocaust survivor who became a leading scholar, government legal adviser, diplomat and international judge, his unique reflections offer a first-hand account, built over decades of experience, of how international law is formed, interpreted, and applied under pressure.
I recently met with Judge Meron at his residence in Trinity College, Oxford, to discuss his memoir, A Thousand Miracles: From Surviving the Holocaust to Judging Genocide. In this interview, Meron, aged 96, reflects on the extraordinary experiences that shaped his commitment to justice, the discipline of applying the law free from politics, and his hope for the future of international justice.
_____________________________________________
Meron’s commitment to international law can be traced back to his childhood during the Second World War. As a young boy in Nazi-occupied Poland, his early years were characterised by the loss of his mother, brother and grandparents, as well as his home. “I was completely disconnected from people my age, growing up in a universe of adults focused on survival”. The loss which would most significantly shape Meron’s professional life, however, was that of an education. “For five years, I was taken out from any context which had a cultural dimension. I did not see a single book…that loss of culture, of learning – it was profound”.
When the war ended, he faced the daunting task of reconstructing his education almost from scratch. Smuggled out of communist Poland with the help of the Jewish Brigade, he arrived in what was then Mandatory Palestine, armed with what he calls “an abstract hunger for education”.
At that stage, the language of ‘international law’ had not entered his thinking. “I simply did not know about Nuremberg” he says, “Nuremberg was people in the West with access to radio, newspapers…my interest was growing from my experience”. He was particularly struck by the industrial scale of the Holocaust and its execution within a highly educated and informed society. “That such people could be such an easy target – it was shocking”. Meron, convinced that formal structures must exist to “create real obstacles” to evil actors, committed himself to the pursuit of international justice.
Convinced of his calling, Meron’s trajectory was swift. He completed his schooling in Haifa, entered the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, helped by what he humbly refers to as “strokes of luck”, found his way to Harvard Law School, which was the only one of eight institutions to accept his application. There, an intellectual shift occurred. Harvard’s Socratic method, with its emphasis on questioning and analysis, “suited me so much more”, he recalls. “You could give a completely wrong answer and still get a good grade if your analysis was original”. A fellowship at Cambridge followed, under the mentorship of Hersch Lauterpacht, and ultimately, he was invited by Shabtai Rosenne, former Legal Adviser at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to take up a legal position.
In contrast to the freedom Meron found through his studies, his early years in the Israeli Ministry were more constrained. Meron is frank about this tension, “I was the youngest and most junior person there” he says, “I would not typically be asked about my views on international law and the policy of the government. I would be given assignments and try to write something sensible”. Yet even within those limits, he came to articulate a view of the government lawyer’s role that would mark the rest of his career. Lawyers advising States, he insists, carry obligations that are closer to those of judges than private practitioners. Their task is not to tailor legal arguments to policy preferences, but to “call the law as they see it”.
This principle was tested early and publicly. In the aftermath of the Six Day War, Meron, still in his thirties and at that time posted to Israel’s Mission to the UN in New York, was unexpectedly elevated to Chief Legal Adviser at the Israeli Ministry. It was during this time that he was asked to give his now famous but then secret opinion on the legality of Israeli civilian settlements in the Occupied West Bank, the Golan Heights and Gaza.
Meron, as was later uncovered by journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg, had advised the Israeli Government that the establishment of civilian settlements in occupied territory violated the Fourth Geneva Convention. Recalling the government’s response to his advice, Meron says “I faced a determined and deliberate policy of ignoring me… They tried to accommodate me by following the fiction of establishing civilian settlements but calling them military outposts, but subsequently, nothing at all”. In the years that followed, Meron remained resolute. “I never thought that I should give an opinion which would make things more palatable for the government, cosmetically”.
Meron reflects on the criticism that the law – particularly international law – is an obstacle to policy-making and pragmatic political solutions. Quite the opposite, in his view.
“Take Palestine. Good legal principle would mean that measures taken by the occupying power are, by their very nature, temporary […] My opinion, in the long run, would have served significantly the possibility of accommodating conflicting Israeli and Arab interests; creating the infrastructure necessary for a two State solution”.
Meron notes that the Israeli Government did not penalise him for his opinion. Instead, he was offered a job to be Ambassador to Canada “which was not exactly Gulag”. But still, he missed the intellectual freedom of academia.
“In academia, you are not bound by civil service or government regulations, your universe is much more open” and “that gives you a tremendous possibility to influence policy”.
Subsequently, Meron spent several decades as a Professor at Harvard Law School, UC Berkeley, New York University, and the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies. He is currently an Honorary Fellow at Trinity College, Oxford University. Meron describes being an academic in Oxford as “a dream come true”, and upon joining him for lunch in the Senior Common Room, it is clear he is what the kids call a BNOC (Big Name on Campus). Meron even has his own room in the college – the Meron Room – with his judges’ robes hanging on the back of the door, his Order of St. Michael and St. George and Légion d’honneur behind glass, and pictures of his late wife, Monique, above the fireplace. Meron recalls Monique often; his steadfast supporter during their 43-year marriage. After her passing, Meron has found solace in writing poetry, with his latest book, Things I Dread, being both an homage to her and a way to process his life. Gracefully, Monique still has a home in the gardens of Trinity College – a Japanese Zelkowa tree planted by the college faculty in her memory.
Meron’s experience of academia was liberating after the institutional discipline of government service. That freedom, in turn, prepared him for what he describes as the most meaningful chapter of his life – his years as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where he served four terms as President, and three terms as President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT).
During this time, between 2002-2019, Meron contributed to some of the most significant decisions in international criminal law. He talks proudly of presiding over the first genocide case in post-WWII Europe (Krstic), and his role in the Kunarac appeal judgment, which progressed international jurisprudence on sexual violence and the definition of consent. However, Meron speaks candidly about the criticism he faced during his presidency; his tenure as President was marked by several divisive decisions, driven in part by his loyalty to principle and deliberately narrow approach to adjudication.
The function of an international criminal court, he insists, is often misunderstood. It is not to write history and it is not to promote reconciliation. Those may be desirable consequences; “we all want judgments to influence peace-making” and “a well-documented judgment presents an excellent display of the facts”. Indeed, he acknowledges the power of removing abusive actors from the scene for trial, noting that “the Dayton Agreement probably would never have been concluded if Karadzic had remained in such a state of influence”. But these positive consequences are not, he says, the function of a court. The function, he says, is simply “to provide a fair trial according to due process and the rule of law”.
This insistence on restraint has not always been popular. Meron speaks candidly about the criticism he faced following the Appeal Chamber’s decision to overturn the conviction of Croatian General, Ante Gotovina. The backlash, he recalls, came not only from sceptics of international justice but from its most committed supporters who assumed that “the high-profile nature of the case meant it must result in conviction”. Meron preferred to not address the criticism, letting his judgments speak for themselves. “I have always believed that the only answer I can produce is to tell people, read my judgment, that is the sum total of what I think about the subject”.
Meron notes that parts of the appeal judgment were later vindicated in the Croatia v Serbia (Genocide Convention) proceedings before the International Court of Justice and he maintains that despite the 3-2 split, “there was unanimous recognition that the Trial Chamber was wrong…there were basic things [they] took liberty with”. But the consequences were considerable. “For several years” he says, “I was the whipping boy of international lawyers”.
Despite the difficulty of this time, and the thick skin he claims to have never acquired, Meron remains steadfast in how “absolutely essential it is for a judge to exclude all extraneous agendas”. Looking back at my life, he says, “the most creative, the most worthwhile, was my nearly two decades on international courts”. “I’m lucky” he says, “because, while people may disagree with me, for example on the Palestine issue, I’m regarded as a sort of fanatic of justice in the principled way”.
As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Meron about the future of international justice. In an era of shifting global alliances and increased distrust of multilateralism, what comes next? Meron is characteristically hopeful. We are, he says “in a very, very bad stage now for international criminal justice [but] international humanitarian law and international criminal law have never developed in a straight line”. He refers to periods of regression followed by reform, often catalysed by atrocity. “Take the American Civil War – very cruel, very brutal – but it created the Lieber Code, which influenced later, the Hague Conventions on Land Warfare. Take the Battle of Solferino, which led to the establishment of the ICRC, which led to the Geneva Conventions”. He believes in the resilience of international courts and tribunals, pointing to the International Criminal Court which, despite US sanctions on the Prosecutor, Deputy Prosecutors and numerous judges, has continued to function and even confirm charges against ex-President of The Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte. “There have been ups and downs, and this is probably natural for evolution of a body of law. Those ups and downs have happened in the past; they will happen again, but I’m hopeful”.
We agree it is fitting to end our discussion on that optimistic note, bringing our interview to a close. Meron wishes me well at the Porter’s Lodge before turning to cross the campus gardens, passing Monique’s tree, and heading toward the historic university that has proudly embraced him in as part of its legacy. I find myself thinking of the students there who are fortunate to benefit from his 96 years of wisdom and experience, as he continues to inspire the next generation of international lawyers to put principle before politics, to have the moral courage to do what is right, and to believe that justice, if evenly applied, can end the cycle of atrocity crimes.
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