Graham Blewitt started to work on war crimes when a special unit on Nazi crimes was set up in Australia in 1988. A few years later he became the first person to arrive in the Hague to set up the Office of the Prosecutor at the new International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He remained the deputy prosecutor of the first post-Nuremberg international tribunal for ten years. But on top of the ICTY’s ground-breaking judgments, for him the biggest legacy of the Yugoslav court was the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC). He actually believes that if the ICC had been given jurisdiction on the crime of aggression from the start, there wouldn’t have been a war in Ukraine, or it could have been halted very early. Today, he says he “would love to see the ICC regain its credibility and to get on with prosecuting people like Netanyahu and Putin.”
Australia has also been back in the news with attempts to prosecute war crimes allegedly committed in Afghanistan by Australians forces. “My view is that the political scene in Australia is just not willing to tackle the question of war crimes and war criminals in Australia,” Blewitt says. What’s essential to change that? The creation of an independent, permanent war crimes unit in order to avoid ad hoc responses.
ASYMMETRICAL HAIRCUTS
This podcast has been published as part of a partnership between Justice Info and Asymmetrical Haircuts, a podcast on international justice produced from The Hague by journalists Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg, who retain full control and independence over the contents of the podcast.
