20 No. 74 JUSTICE today call international humanitarian law. Third, with his organization of hospitals, soup kitchens, and orphanages – the staples of international humanitarian assistance that provided women, children, the sick and the elderly with a semblance of dignity in the face of the worst of all horrors and evils – Wallenberg embodied the best of what we today call international humanitarian intervention. Fourth, by saving Jews from certain deportation, death, and atrocity, he symbolized what we today call the “responsibility to protect doctrine” – on which I co-edited a book – a Canadian-led initiative adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, when I was serving as justice minister and, regrettably, honored more in its breach than in its observance. Fifth and finally, Wallenberg’s last rescue was perhaps his most memorable. As the Nazis advanced on Budapest and threatened to blow up the city’s ghetto and liquidate the remaining Jews, he put the Nazi generals on notice that they would be held accountable and brought to justice, if not executed, for their war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Nazi generals desisted. Some 70,000 more Jews were saved, thanks to the indomitable courage of one person prepared to confront radical evil. In warning the Nazi generals that they would be held responsible for their war crimes, Wallenberg was a forerunner of the Nuremberg principles and what today we call international criminal law. To the “desk murderer” Adolf Eichmann, who was organizing the transports to Auschwitz, Wallenberg was the Judenhund, the “Jewish dog.” To the Jews, as those saved by Wallenberg would tell me, he was the “guardian angel.” Yet, while Wallenberg saved so many, he was not himself saved by so many who could. Rather than greet Wallenberg as the liberator he was, the Soviets – who entered Hungary as liberators themselves on January 17, 1945 – disappeared him into the gulags. The Soviets first claimed that he died of a heart attack in July 1947, before changing their story to claim that he was murdered, also in July 1947. These contradictory Soviet claims have been refuted by several inquiries, including the 1990 International Commission on the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg, which I chaired, along with Wallenberg’s brother, Guy von Dardel, Elie Wiesel, Russian scholar Mikhail Chlenov and former Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner. Indeed, in 1985, as our commission report cited, a U.S. federal court found the evidence “incontrovertible” that Wallenberg was alive in 1947, “compelling” that he was alive in the 1960s and “credible” that he remained alive into the ‘80s – a position held by Soviet Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov, who conveyed this information personally to Chlenov and me in a meeting we had in Moscow in November 1989, shortly before Sakharov’s death in December. It is imperative that the international community at this important inflection point finally comes together to secure for Wallenberg and his family the long-denied truth and justice that's owed to them. Accordingly, I am delighted that Susanne Berger, founder and coordinator of the Raoul Wallenberg Research Initiative and a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, has launched an initiative that opens up the blank pages of history. The countries in which Wallenberg is an honorary citizen, including Canada, should lead an international consortium calling upon Russia to open its archives and reveal the long-sought and suppressed truth about this disappeared hero of humanity, whom the UN called “the greatest humanitarian of the 20th century.” Indeed, as Israel begins its chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in March, it should convene the countries of Wallenberg's citizenship and honorary citizenship and launch an IHRA initiative in the pursuit of truth and justice over the fate of Raoul Wallenberg. For the IHRA, Sweden and the countries of which he is an honorary citizen, as Wallenberg said, there should be no other choice. In tandem, these countries should hold parliamentary hearings with witness testimony to further this compelling initiative. Hopefully, this year's poignant anniversary will be not only an act of remembrance, but a reminder to act on behalf of our common humanity. n Irwin Cotler is the international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, emeritus professor of law at McGill University, Isaacman distinguished visiting professor in Holocaust and genocide studies at Gratz College, former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, and international counsel to political prisoners.
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