JUSTICE - No. 66

15 Spring 2021 64% of that group felt that Holocaust education should be compulsory in their schools and 80% believed it was important to learn about the Holocaust. In January 2000, as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, I worked with the Prime Minister of Sweden, Göran Persson, to establish the Holocaust Education Task Force to promote Holocaust education, then with only a handful of countries taking part. This has now become the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, with over thirty member countries. In the U.S., only seventeen states have mandatory Holocaust education, while a number of other states include Holocaust education in their curriculum, although they do not mandate that it be taught. There is progress. This year the U.S. Congress passed the Never Again Education Act to provide $10 million to promote Holocaust education through grants provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In our September 2020 negotiations with the German government, the commitment was to provide the Claims Conference with funding for Shoah education: 9 million euros in 2020, with an increase of 3 million euros each year, so there will be 18 million euros by 2023. Has the Holocaust Taught the World Anything? Are We Any Better for the Lessons it Should Have Given Us? At one level, an argument can be made that we are repeating the mistakes of the Holocaust. After all, many acts of genocide and violations of human rights have occurred since the end of World War II, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur, Syria, Myanmar, China, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. And the list goes on, without effective international intervention. But let me suggest that the world is slowly developing a set of international instruments that have the possibility of incorporating the lessons of the Holocaust, if combined with the will of the United States and our European allies. Let us look at how far we have come. Prior to World War II, individuals had no rights under international law, and depended solely on how their nation, even Germany under Hitler, treated or mistreated its citizens. No other state had a legal right to protest the treatment of another state’s abuse of its citizens within their territory, nor did individuals have a global forum to present their cases of mistreatment. This is not to say that nations were helpless to combat Hitler’s mass murder of Jews, had they wished to do so. There is no question that the Holocaust and the brutality of World War II have been a dramatic catalyst in improving the rights of individuals who now have internationally guaranteed rights and tribunals to assert them against states that violate them. But we must always be cognizant that these rights are fragile and depend heavily for their enforcement on other nations, which, in turn, largely act in their own interest. The Charter of the United Nations did not create an enforceable set of rights, given the strong opposition of the Soviet Union and the reservations of major western allies, including the U.S. In order to get the U.S. Senate to ratify the UN Charter and avoid a repeat of the disastrous defeat of the Covenant of the League of Nations after World War I, the UN Charter only used vague language to promote respect for “human rights and fundamental freedom for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted as a non-binding UN resolution in 1948, remains a landmark today. Since 1948 there have been numerous international agreements such as the Genocide Convention; the International Covenants on Human Rights; the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination; the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; the Convention against Torture. In the early 1950s, as a direct result of the Holocaust, the Council of Europe adopted the European Convention of Human Rights which established the first organization allowing individuals the ability to sue states which violate their rights: the European Court of Human Rights, which remains active to this day. Its judgments are largely honored. One expert, Thomas Buergenthal, a former judge of the International Court of Justice, has called the European Court “the most effective international system for the protection of human rights in existence today.” The International Court of Justice in The Hague was created in 1945 to be the principal civil court of the UN and hear disputes between countries. This year, in a case brought by Gambia against Myanmar, the Court issued a provisional decision aimed at protecting the Ruyhinga from further persecution under the convention on the prevention of genocide. Moreover, international criminal law and institutions to enforce it has evolved. This began with the Nuremberg tribunal to try Nazi war criminals. In 1993, the UN Security Council established the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and several of the