Small States and the Long, Forgotten History of International Criminal Tribunals

About the lecture
The Nuremberg Tribunal, established after the Second World War, is widely described as the first international criminal tribunal and, accordingly, as the “birth” of International Criminal Law (ICL). This narrative rests on a broader assumption: that traditional notions of sovereignty made ICL and international criminal tribunals unacceptable from the medieval period until Nuremberg, if not unimaginable for much of that time. Even non-criminal international tribunals are often said to have disappeared for several centuries—until the late eighteenth century—during the height of sovereignty’s ascendancy.

Dr. Bohrer challenges this consensus by identifying examples of international criminal tribunals—in the sense of multi-sovereign and supra-sovereign penal adjudicatory bodies—in every century since the late medieval period. He shows that these tribunals were doctrinally related both to one another and to contemporary ICL, since war crimes, as well as certain other wrongs, were long regarded in European and later Western jurisprudence as universal crimes. ICL, he argues, is therefore not a post-Second World War innovation, but a legal project with a much longer past.

The lecture further argues that small sovereigns played a crucial role in sustaining recourse to such tribunals across the centuries, including during periods in which stricter notions of sovereignty were on the rise. Compared with larger and more powerful sovereigns, small sovereigns were often more inclined to conduct international relations not through unilateral coercion, but through multilateral alliances and joint institutions. Relatedly, whereas larger powers tended to develop and assert stricter doctrines of sovereignty as a means of enhancing their power, smaller sovereigns often showed greater willingness to preserve older, more flexible understandings of sovereignty while adapting them to changing circumstances.
Dr. Bohrer will also consider the central causes of the pretermission of this long – and long-forgotten – history of international criminal tribunals. One such cause, he argues, has been the tendency to write the history of international law through an excessive focus on the actions and perspectives of great powers.

About the speaker
Dr. Ziv Bohrer is a senior lecturer at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law, a research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies and an advisor at Texas Tech Law School Center for Military Law and Policy. His main research area is Public International Law, with an emphasis on both current and historical issues relating to International Criminal Law and to International Humanitarian Law (The Law of War). Dr. Bohrer is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Journal of the History of International Law. 

About the lecture series
This lecture series examines the role of small states such as Liechtenstein and Switzerland before international courts. It focuses on groundbreaking judgements such as the Nottebohm case (1955), the forgotten history of international criminal tribunals, and what is arguably one of the most significant proceedings in international law in history – the International Court of Justice’s 2025 climate opinion. The presentations demonstrate how small states shape international justice despite limited resources and what strategies they employ to make their voices heard within multilateral systems. In doing so, they combine in-depth historical analysis with current debates to shed light on the positioning of small states in global legal issues ranging from human rights to climate protection.

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Der Vortrag ist in englischer Sprache. / The lecture will be held in English. 

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