Earlier this year, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan sought arrest warrants for two Israeli and three Hamas leaders on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Israel-Gaza war.
Before he did so, he consulted a panel of six experts, including Amal Clooney and Baroness Helena Kennedy. Also on the panel was someone with a lower public profile, but who is one of the world’s foremost experts on the laws of war. Theodor Meron, 94, helped to establish the foundations for international criminal tribunals and oversaw the world’s first genocide trials.
He is also a Holocaust survivor and former Israeli official who, in the first decades of Israel’s existence, advised on legal arguments against what have become some of the country’s most controversial policies, including on West Bank settlements. Foreign Policy dubbed him “the man who tried to save Israel from itself”.
I meet Meron in Oxford—where he’s still working as a professor—on a cold November morning. Ted, as he goes by, is waiting for me at Trinity College when I arrive. He gives me a tour, greeting students we pass and telling me about the architecture before we sit down to talk.
He has always been driven, he says, by a desire to work towards “a world with no Holocausts”; to make whatever contributions he could, however small, to “a universe in which injustice and violence and mistreatment of people on ethnic and religious grounds is less likely.”
Born to a Polish Jewish family in 1930, Meron’s childhood was cut short by the outbreak of war and he spent several years in a Nazi labour camp. By the time Allied victory came, he had lost most of his family and emigrated alone to Mandate Palestine, where he had some relatives. He was there when, in May 1948, Israel was declared an independent nation.
Meron went on to spend 20 years in the Israeli foreign service, including as chief legal advisor, ambassador to Canada and permanent representative to the UN in Geneva. Despite his lost years of education, he later held professorships at Harvard, New York and Berkeley, specialising in international humanitarian and criminal law.
At the age of 71, an opportunity arose for him to do that directly. He began a new career, serving variously as a judge and president of the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He presided over dozens of war crimes trials and appeals, including the one that judicially recognised what happened in Srebrenica as a genocide for the first time. He once described his career trajectory as a “kind of poetic justice”.
Meron is no longer a citizen of Israel, having moved to the US in the late 1970s. Even so, his connection to the country gave him pause for thought when he was asked to join Khan’s panel.
“I felt that, having served 20 years as a judge… of UN war crimes tribunals, I have to live by my principles, even when I would not have chosen to have that assignment,” he tells me. “Once I was offered [it], I was approached by the prosecutor-in-chief, I felt that ethically and morally I had to say yes.”
He understood that he might well be opening himself up to personal attack, but he sees his role as a judge and legal advisor as a “narrow” one: to evaluate the evidence and apply the relevant law.
The experts unanimously agreed that there were reasonable legal grounds to pursue the warrants. In November those warrants were finally approved by a panel of ICC judges, but it’s too late for some. At least two of the Hamas leaders named on the application—Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh—are dead. The third, Mohammed Deif, likely is too. Only Israel’s recently fired former defence minister Yoav Gallant and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu remain standing.
I ask Meron if this kind of transitional justice could one day contribute to peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. “Probably,” he replies, but “we are not yet there. We are now still in the middle of a very tragic set of wars and armed conflicts. But one day, perhaps.”
Meron served as a judge for the international criminal tribunals until the age of 91.
“In the long run,” he says, “perhaps the most important thing—and I’m speaking now from the perspective of a person who has attained some age—is to look back and say: is my conscience clear?
“And when you uphold those principles, when you work for them, perhaps the answer is yes.”
