CIAO DATE: 07/03

Reflections on Intergenerational Justice

Introduction

In 1992, I served as an expert witness in an Australian war crimes trial, Paul Gregory Malone v. Mikolay Berezowsky, a case brought by the Commonwealth of Australia against one of its citizens for a crime committed in a different country fifty years before the court proceedings. The defendant was alleged to have had a role in the murder in the summer of 1942, of 102 Ukrainian Jews in the village of Gnivan as part of Nazi genocide. The difference between my experience and that of my colleagues arose almost entirely from the lapse of time between genocide and its retribution. I call such issues intergenerational as opposed to the problems of transitional justice described above. How could a trial fifty years after the crime, and half way round the world from the site, be just? And what could be done for the victims? Was justice possible for the defendant? Was it morally right to try an old man when the witnesses had either died or forgotten what they once knew? These questions have either directly or indirectly involved the emergence of a new intergenerational jurisprudence.

This paper was written was written for The Legacy of Abuse: Confronting the Past, Facing the Future.

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