Gregory Gordon (lawyer)

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Gregory S. Gordon is an American scholar of international law and a former genocide prosecutor during the Media Case at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Gordon is known for his advocacy of the criminalization under international law of a broader category of speech likely to cause mass atrocities (more broad than incitement to genocide), and his book Atrocity Speech Law in which he advances this argument.

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Career

Gordon worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as prosecutor of the Media Case, [1] [2] and the Office of Special Investigations. During his academic career, he was the director of University of North Dakota's Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies and worked for the Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention. [3] He currently works for the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. [4]

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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 a new category of international law, which he terms "atrocity speech law", which would expand prosecutable offenses. The category would be more broad than incitement to genocide (currently criminalized), and would include ordering war crimes or crimes against humanity as an inchoate offense, which would be prosecutable even if the crimes ordered never took place. Gordon also supports the criminalization of incitement of war crimes and crimes against humanity. [1] [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. [1] 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 supported the prosecution of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide. [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. [1] [8] In the book, he 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 incitement, 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. [1] Benjamin B. Ferencz, chief prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen Trial, wrote the foreword to the book. [9]

Works

Related Research Articles

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Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.

Hate speech is a legal term with varied meaning. It 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 the former Yugoslavia</span> 1993–2017 Netherlands-based United Nations ad hoc court

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal was an ad hoc court located in The Hague, Netherlands.

Universal jurisdiction is a legal principle that allows states or international organizations to claim criminal jurisdiction over an accused person regardless of where the alleged crime was committed, and regardless of the accused's nationality, country of residence, or any other relation to the prosecuting entity. Crimes prosecuted under universal jurisdiction are considered crimes against all, too serious to tolerate jurisdictional arbitrage. The concept of universal jurisdiction is therefore closely linked to the idea that some international norms are erga omnes, or owed to the entire world community, as well as to the concept of jus cogens – that certain international law obligations are binding on all states.

<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.

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

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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 Rwandan genocide.

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 singer-songwriter who was formerly very popular in Rwanda. His patriotic songs were playlist staples on the national radio station Radio Rwanda during the war from October 1990 to July 1994 before the Rwandan Patriotic Front took power. For actions during the April 1994 genocide against Tutsi, 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 late 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Command responsibility</span> Doctrine of hierarchical accountability

In the practice of international law, command responsibility is the legal doctrine of hierarchical accountability for war crimes, whereby a commanding officer (military) and a superior officer (civil) is legally responsible for the war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed by his subordinates; thus, a commanding officer always is accountable for the acts of commission and the acts of omission of his soldiers.

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 Rwandan genocide.

<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.

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.

<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 or the Rwandan 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. 1 2 3 4 5 Van Landingham, Rachel (March 29, 2018). "Punishing Tomorrow's Tweeting Goebbels". Lawfare . Retrieved May 9, 2020.
  2. ↑ https://www.icc-cpi.int/node/194159
  3. ↑ "Professor Gregory Gordon joins the Sentinel Project as advisor on hate speech". Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention. 2013. Retrieved May 9, 2020.
  4. ↑ "Gregory S. Gordon: Centre for International Law Research and Policy". www.cilrap.org. 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. ↑ Gordon 2017.
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