Gregory Gordon (lawyer)

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Gregory S. Gordon is an American professor and scholar of international law and former Legal Officer for the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICTR. Gordon is known for his academic work calling for the criminalization under international law of a broader category of speech likely to cause and/or fuel mass atrocities (i.e., broader than mere incitement to genocide), and his book Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition (Oxford University Press 2017) in which he advances this argument.

Contents

Career

Gordon served as a Legal Officer for the Office of The Prosecutor (OTP) at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on the Media Case. [1] Before leaving the OTP, he was assigned as an attorney for the first trial team established to prosecute the Media Case (which, at the time, also included attorneys James Kirkpatrick Stewart of Canada and Craig McConaghy of Australia). He went on to serve as a prosecutor for the United States Department of Justice, first with the Criminal Tax Section of the Tax Division (during which time he served as a Special Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and as a liaison to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces), and then with the Criminal Division's Office of Special Investigations (known as the "Nazi Hunting" unit). During his academic career, he has served as the director of University of North Dakota's Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies (where he also worked as a law professor) and has been a consultant for the Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention, among other non-governmental organizations. [2] He is currently Professor of Law at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, where he has previously served as Associate Dean (External Relations/Development) and Director of both the Research Postgraduates and Legal History LLM Programs. [3]

Views

Atrocity Speech Law cover has a picture of Joseph Goebbels. Atrocity Speech Law cover.jpg
Atrocity Speech Law cover has a picture of Joseph Goebbels.

Gordon supports establishing categorizing the body of law regulating the relationship between speech and international crimes as "atrocity speech law." The new appellation would also involve expanding the types of prosecutable offenses within its ambit. This would mean going beyond mere incitement to genocide (currently criminalized), and adding to the list of prosecutable offenses incitement to war crimes and incitement to crimes against humanity (inchoate offense, as they would be prosecutable, if the right elements were present, even if the target crimes advocated never took place). Gordon also supports criminalizing the ordering of atrocity crimes as inchoate offenses (at present, ordering can be prosecuted only if the target crime ordered is actually committed). [4] [5] He supports the prosecution of people who are guilty of atrocity speech, and argues that international criminal law has a deterrent effect on those who are contemplating committing mass murder. [4] Gordon has said that "if you don't prosecute the purveyors of these horrible messages, then you will definitely be looking at another genocide down the road". [6] He has analyzed the possibility of prosecuting Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide and hate speech as the crime against humanity of persecution. [7]

Atrocity Speech Law

Gordon's book Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition, which is about extreme hate speech in international law, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017 and has received multiple positive reviews. [4] [8] In the book, which Giovanni Chiarini has described as a "paradigm-shifting" work that "has helped change the very vocabulary we use to describe the rules and jurisprudence governing the relationship between hate speech and core international crimes," [9] Gordon delineates the boundary between protected free speech and speech which is likely to cause mass violence, which he believes should be outlawed under international law. Gordon criticizes the current state of law on atrocity speech, which he considers fragmented and incoherent. For example, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia came to different conclusions about the prosecution of hate speech as crimes against humanity (persecution), with the ICTR holding that speech that does not directly call for violence may be prosecutable, while the ICTY disagreed. Gordon proposes an expansion and systematization of the criminalization of atrocity speech. [4] Benjamin B. Ferencz, chief prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen Trial, wrote the foreword to the book, which he praised as "an important cornerstone that will serve as a foundation stone for the future prosecution of crimes against humanity." [10]

Works

Related Research Articles

Hate speech is a term with varied meaning and has no single, consistent definition. It is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution states that hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation". There is no single definition of what constitutes "hate" or "disparagement". Legal definitions of hate speech vary from country to country.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda</span> 1994 court of the United Nations Security Council

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was an international court established in November 1994 by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 955 in order to adjudicate people charged for the Rwandan genocide and other serious violations of international law in Rwanda, or by Rwandan citizens in nearby states, between 1 January and 31 December 1994. The court eventually convicted 61 individuals and acquitted 14.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), or the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty that criminalizes genocide and obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of its prohibition. It was the first legal instrument to codify genocide as a crime, and the first human rights treaty unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, on 9 December 1948, during the third session of the United Nations General Assembly. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951 and has 153 state parties as of June 2024.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines</span> Radio station in the 1994 Rwandan genocide

Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), nicknamed "Radio Genocide" or "Hutu Power Radio", was a Rwandan radio station which broadcast from July 8, 1993, to July 31, 1994. It played a significant role in inciting the Rwandan genocide that took place from April to July 1994, and has been described by some scholars as having been a de facto arm of the Hutu regime in Rwanda.

Jean-Paul Akayesu is a former teacher, school inspector, and Republican Democratic Movement (MDR) politician from Rwanda, convicted of genocide for his role in inciting the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

Léon Mugesera is a convicted genocidaire from Rwanda who took residence in Quebec, Canada. He was deported from Canada for an inflammatory anti-Tutsi speech which his critics allege was a precursor to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In 2016, he was convicted of incitement to genocide and sentenced to life in prison.

Simon Bikindi was a Rwandan musician and singer who was prominent in Rwanda during the 1980s and 1990s. His patriotic and ultranationalist songs were playlist staples on the national radio station Radio Rwanda during the Rwandan Civil War. For his actions during the Rwandan genocide, he was tried and convicted for incitement to genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 2008. He died of diabetes at a Beninese hospital in December 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International criminal law</span> Public international law

International criminal law (ICL) is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetration. The core crimes under international law are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.

Augustin Ngirabatware is a Rwandan politician who participated in the Rwandan genocide and has been convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Ferdinand Nahimana is a Rwandan historian, who was convicted of incitement to genocide for his role in the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Rapp</span> American politician

Stephen J. Rapp is an American lawyer and the former United States ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles A. Adeogun-Phillips</span> English lawyer

Charles Ayodeji Adeogun-Phillips is a former United Nations genocide and war crimes prosecutor, international lawyer and founder of Charles Anthony (Lawyers) LLP.

An atrocity crime is a violation of international criminal law that falls under the historically three legally defined international crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Ethnic cleansing is widely regarded as a fourth mass atrocity crime by legal scholars and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the field, despite not yet being recognized as an independent crime under international law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals</span> International criminal court

The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) or the MICT in Kinyarwanda, also known simply as the Mechanism, is an international court established by the United Nations Security Council in 2010 to perform the remaining functions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) following the completion of those tribunals' respective mandates. It is based in both Arusha, Tanzania and The Hague, Netherlands.

Hate media is media that contributes to the demonization and stigmatization of people who belong to different groups. It has played an influential role in the incitement to genocide, with notable examples of it being Radio Televizija Srbije during the wars in Yugoslavia, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) during the Rwandan genocide, and Nazi Germany's Der Stürmer newspaper.

Prosecution of gender-targeted crimes is the legal proceedings to prosecute crimes such as rape and domestic violence. The earliest documented prosecution of gender-based/targeted crimes is from 1474 when Sir Peter von Hagenbach was convicted for rapes committed by his troops. However, the trial was only successful in indicting Sir von Hagenbach with the charge of rape because the war in which the rapes occurred was "undeclared" and thus the rapes were considered illegal only because of this. Gender-targeted crimes continued to be prosecuted, but it was not until after World War II when an international criminal tribunal – the International Military Tribunal for the Far East – were officers charged for being responsible of the gender-targeted crimes and other crimes against humanity. Despite the various rape charges, the Charter of the Tokyo Tribunal did not make references to rape, and rape was considered as subordinate to other war crimes. This is also the situation for other tribunals that followed, but with the establishments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), there was more attention to the prosecution of gender-targeted crimes with each of the statutes explicitly referring to rape and other forms of gender-targeted violence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Incitement to genocide</span> Crime under international law

Incitement to genocide is a crime under international law which prohibits inciting (encouraging) the commission of genocide. An extreme form of hate speech, incitement to genocide is an inchoate offense and is theoretically subject to prosecution even if genocide does not occur, although charges have never been brought in an international court without mass violence having occurred. "Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" was forbidden by the Genocide Convention in 1948. Incitement to genocide is often cloaked in metaphor and euphemism and may take many forms beyond direct advocacy, including dehumanization and accusation in a mirror.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Benesch</span> American journalist and scholar of speech

Susan Benesch is an American journalist and scholar of speech who is known for founding the Dangerous Speech Project. Benesch is a free speech advocate, recommending the use of counterspeech rather than censorship to delegitimize harmful speech.

International speech crimes are acts of speech which are criminalized under international law. Incitement to genocide is one example, but the Nuremberg trials and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted some defendants of crimes against humanity based on speech acts. For example, Serb politician Vojislav Šešelj was indicted for crimes against humanity, including "war propaganda and incitement of hatred towards non-Serb people". Serbian politician Radovan Karadžić was convicted of "participating in a joint criminal enterprise to commit crimes against humanity on the basis of his public speeches and broadcasts". Dario Kordić and Radoslav Brđanin were also convicted of crimes based on instigating violence in public speeches.

Accusation in a mirror (AiM) is a technique often used in the context of hate speech incitement, where one falsely attributes one's own motives and/or intentions to one's adversaries. It has been cited, along with dehumanization, as one of the indirect or cloaked forms of incitement to genocide, which has contributed to the commission of genocide, for example in the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the Armenian genocide. By invoking collective self-defense, accusation in a mirror is used to justify genocide, similar to self-defense as a defense for individual homicide.

References

  1. ↑ "[MEDIA] - Nahimana et al - Stipulation of the parties regarding what would be the testimony of Crystal Nix-Hinds, Denise Minor and Gregory Gordon with regard to document obtained in Rwanda" (PDF). IRMCT. Retrieved May 8, 2024.
  2. ↑ "Professor Gregory Gordon joins the Sentinel Project as advisor on hate speech". Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention. 2013. Retrieved May 9, 2020.
  3. ↑ "Gregory S. Gordon: Centre for International Law Research and Policy". www.cilrap.org. Retrieved May 9, 2020.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Van Landingham, Rachel (March 29, 2018). "Punishing Tomorrow's Tweeting Goebbels". Lawfare . Retrieved May 9, 2020.
  5. ↑ Gordon, Gregory S. (2011–2012). "Formulating a New Atrocity Speech Offense: Incitement to Commit War Crimes". Loyola University Chicago Law Journal. 43: 281.
  6. ↑ "Gregory S. Gordon". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. May 21, 2009. Retrieved May 10, 2020.
  7. ↑ Gordon, Gregory (2008). "From Incitement to Indictment - Prosecuting Iran's President for Advocating Israel's Destruction and Piecing Together Incitement Law's Emerging Analytical Framework". Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology . 98 (3): 853–920. ISSN   0091-4169. JSTOR   40042789.
  8. ↑ Pauli, Carol (July 20, 2018). "Atrocity Speech Law: Addressing Hate that Does Grave Harm". Human Rights Quarterly. 40 (3): 718–729. doi:10.1353/hrq.2018.0041. ISSN   1085-794X.
  9. ↑ "Revisiting Gregory Gordon's Groundbreaking Work "Atrocity Speech Law" as It Is Transformed from Book into Website | Global Justice Journal". globaljustice.queenslaw.ca. Retrieved May 30, 2024.
  10. ↑ Gordon 2017.
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