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Adam Wagner

ByAdam Wagner, adam wagner

Opinion

How the Holocaust impacted human rights

Out of the carnage of WWII came the Nuremberg trials, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). It is now up to us to make sure these developments in human rights don't falter, says Adam Wagner

January 24, 2019 11:21
Jewish French jurist René Cassin was a key architect of the Declaration (Photo: Getty Images)
2 min read

Out of the carnage of World War Two — the 80 million dead and the worst crime in human history, the Holocaust — a fragile idea emerged which could prevent it all happening again. Three developments in those years advanced the revolutionary idea of universal human rights.

The first was the Nuremberg trials. Immediately after the defeat of Germany, a criminal trial began which set the tone for what followed. Leading Nazis were prosecuted for waging unnecessary war and massacring millions.

US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson opened the trials by calling them “one of the most significant tributes that power has paid to reason”. David Maxwell Fyfe, the Scottish Tory and British prosecutor, said the trials needed to happen because justice was among the “essential prerequisites of freedom, happiness and comfort”, for without it “no man or woman can establish his or her rights”.

Twenty-two men, including Hitler’s one-time successor Hermann Göring, were tried for novel offences of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’, the extermination of a racial group. And the concepts were developed by two Jewish men, Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, whose families were murdered in the Holocaust.