I have the distinct honor and pleasure
to introduce our first Eleanor Roosevelt
Prize recipient Benjamin Ferencz.
Ben in my experience is a man of
boundless energy,
a quick dry wit and in his
self-deprecating fashion all makes, often
makes fun of his relatively diminutive
physical stature.
However there is no diminishing in his
stature in the annals of modern
international criminal justice; he is an
intellectual giant. While the career
track of many new lawyers past and
present begins with the law firm, the
more prestigious the better for future
and financial other prospects, Ben
literally began his career at age 27
prosecuting and convicting Nazis for
carefully organized, implement,
implemented and documented mass murder.
Ben was born in the carpathian mountains
of Transylvania in 1920. When he was 10
months old his family moved to the
United States suddenly not far from here
in Hell's Kitchen. After graduating from
Harvard Law School in 1943,
Ben enlisted in the Army and served
under General Patton fighting in major
campaigns throughout Europe. As Nazi
atrocities were uncovered Ben was
transferred to a newly created war
crimes branch of the army to gather
evidence of Nazi brutality and to
apprehend criminals. "Indelibly seared
into my memory," Ben has said. "Are the
scenes that I witnessed while liberating
these centers of death and destruction.
Even today when I close my eyes I
witness a deadly vision that I can never
forget; the crematoria aglow with fire of
burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated
corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to
be burned.
I had peered into hell."
Shortly after his honorable discharge
from the Army, Ben was recruited for the
Nuremberg War Crimes trials led by
Supreme Court Justice Robert M. Jackson.
Once the trial against Goering and other
Nazi leaders was over, the US had decided
to prosecute a broad cross-section of
Nazi criminals. General Telford Taylor
was assigned as Chief Counsel for 12
subsequent, subsequent trials. Ben was
tasked along with about 50 researchers
to Berlin to scour Nazi offices of
archives. They found overwhelming
evidence of Nazi genocide by German
doctors, lawyers, judges, generals,
industrialists and others who played
leading roles in organizing or
perpetrating Nazi brutalities without
pity or remorse. The SS murder squads
killed every Jewish man, woman and child
that they could lay their hands on.
Gypsies, communist functionaries,
homosexuals and Soviet intellectuals
suffered the same fate. Thanks to the
meticulous Nazi records it was tabulated
that more than a million persons were
deliberately murdered by these special
action groups. Ben became the chief
prosecutor for the United States in the
Einsatzgruppen Case, the case which The
Associated Press called
the biggest murder trial in history; 22
defendants were charged with murdering
more than a million people. This was
Ben's first case. All the defendants were
convicted. Ben's primary objective in the
trial had been to establish a legal
precedent that would encourage a more
humane and secure world in the future.
"Nuremberg taught me," he said. "That
creating a world of tolerance and
compassion would be a long and arduous
task." Ben said that "I also learned that
if we did not devote ourselves to
developing an effective world law the
same cruel mentality that made the
Holocaust possible might one day destroy
the entire human race. His dedication to that
primary objective has never wavered
since. To that end his primary focus was
the establishment of a permanent
International Criminal Tribunal to
punish and deter the world's worst
crimes. He wrote or co-authored numerous
influential books lighting the way to
that achievement, to achieving that
vision. His opus work entitled Planethood
co-written by Ken Keyes in 1988
offered practical steps for the average
citizen to take to help more
deeply establish international law and
urge United Nations reform. It was
critically acclaimed with more than
450,000 copies printed. With the end of
the Cold War the international community
finally proved ready to explore
seriously the possibility of
establishing an International Criminal
Court and Ben remained a diving voice of
optimism. When the Rome Statute creating
that court was affirmed by vote in 1998
Ben addressed the conference asserting
that pending the statute's ratification
by sufficient number of countries, an
International Criminal Court, the missing
link in the world legal court, is within
our grasp. It was ratified in record time
a mere four years later in 2002
reflecting the world's agreement with
Ben's lifelong vision. Since then Ben has
continued to mobilize support for the
ICC taking on media punditry and
informing an often misinformed media
about the court. Indeed with the progress
that has been made since 2002, Ben's
objective goal of replacing the rule of
force with the rule of law may in the
broad sweep of history seem imminent. Of
course in the last few days the Trump
administration has initiated a broadside
against the ICC. China has called for
internment camps against the Uighur. Our
own president has referred to Japanese
internment camps as
a proud moment in our history and of
course he is a neo-nazi apologist. It is
a sad reminder that in today's world a
just rule of law is never guaranteed. A
few of you know that my family had been
dedicated for several genera-
generations to the battle of civil
rights. It is frustrating beyond pain
that I can describe that we are battling
today the same issues that we have
battled for hundreds of years and that
they are coming back more aggressively
and forcefully then I have seen in my
lifetime.
I'm tired however my son will pick up
the battle. My nieces and nephews will
pick up the battle. But that will make
six generations of battles for
fundamental human rights: the right to
vote, the right to control your own body,
the right to breathe and be black. Each
generation is called to vigilance in
support of universal dignity as
articulated in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. Ben's life of work
exemplifies why the American Bar
Association Center for Human Rights must
remain undaunted in the fight and it is
why we honor Ben Ferencz with the
inaugural Eleanor Roosevelt Prize for
Global Human Rights Advance- Advancement.
I appreciate everything done by the
American Bar Association and all of you
here to arrange this meeting and to
recall the 70th anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
which has been a landmark in expressing
human aspirations for a better world.
My own connection with that which had
been briefly mentioned I believe is that
I became the chief prosecutor in one of the
subsequent Nuremberg trial after the
International Military Tribunal trial
was already on. And I accused 22 high-ranking officers selected by me on the
basis of their rank and their education;
they were all either generals or very
well educated some with double
doctorates, and I accused them of crimes
against humanity and for the first time
I used the word genocide although it was
not yet incorporated into the laws to
describe what they were doing. These were
special extermination squads,
Einsatzgruppen. "Einsatz" means "action"
groups their assignment was to fall
behind the German lines and kill every
single Jewish man, woman and child they
could lay their hands on and do the same
thing with gypsies and do the same thing
with any other suspected potential
opponents of the Third Reich and that's
what they did. And being very Germanic
they recorded everything; reports, (speaks German), that's to show
off my German, in English is "Reports from
the Eastern Front" and I had the name of
the unit, the name of the commander, the
number of people the reporter killed, the
name of the town and that was marked
"top-secret" forwarded to Berlin. Berlin
was consolidated into a loose-leaf book
I had the distribution list of over 90
people to whom that was distributed
people who later said they knew nothing
about
it. I took a little adding machine and I
added them up. When I reach a hundred, a
million people murdered, it's a million
people; it's more people than you've ever
looked at, uh I could be sampling, I flew
from Berlin, where I had the headquarters
to do the research, to Nuremberg. I
presented that to my boss, then General
Telford Taylor, later we were law
partners in New York, and I said, "We've
got to put on a new trial." He said, "We
can't. The lawyers have already been
assigned.
We've got 12 files going. The Pentagon's
not gonna give us any more budgets for
this. We can't put on a new trial."
I said, "It's impossible. I have in my hand
mass murder on a scale never before seen
in human history.
You're not gonna let these guys go!"
and he said, "Well can you do it in
addition to your other work?" and I said,
"Sure." He said, "Okay, you're it." So I became
the chief prosecutor of the biggest
murder trial in human history.
It was my first case; I had never been in a
courtroom. (laughter) It's true, I will confess. I got
a scholarship from the Harvard Law
School for my exam on criminal law and
I've been raised around here in the
slums of New York and I knew plenty of
criminals. I didn't know any lawyers. (laughter)
However with that background, I rested my case in two days.
Moreno Ocampo eat your heart out (laughter).
In two days I rested my case and convicted all
of them and 13 of them were sentenced to
death by a three judges, American judges
led by Michael Musmanno who was a Navy
captain during the war and who was a
Superior Court of Pennsylvania. And the
important thing, connection with our
human rights thinking, I asked myself
"What do you ask for for penalty?" Here
I've got these 22 guys and this 20,
ridiculous reason: 22 because there're only 22 seats.
Sorry kids the seats are sold out.
22 seats and I had 3000 men listed, each one of them
beyond any doubt, mass murder, including
thousands of children shot one shot at a
time. What do you ask for? Well I thought
I'm trying to do justice. How do you
balance the scales of justice? You've got
a million people murdered, innocent
people who've never committed any crimes
and then you got a handful of
murderers maybe more if you want to
round them up. I said there is no room
for justice in a case like that and if I
could get a rule of law which would
protect people, that might be more useful
because the victims were murdered simply
because they didn't share the race, the
religion or the ideology of the
executioners and I thought that was a
horrible thing. And so I asked the court
to affirm by international criminal law
the right of all human beings to live in
peace and dignity regardless of their
race or creed and the court agreed with
me and sentenced 13 of them to death but the
rest of it was a principle of law. Four
were actually executed then came
clemency actions. So that principle of
law which I tried to develop as a young
inexperienced kid at 27 has remained
with me. I have no doubt that my own
experience as a combat soldier in World
War Two: I landed on the beaches of
Normandy, I went through the Maginot Line,
I went through the Siegfried line, I
crossed the Rhine on a pontoon bridge while
driving a Jeep, I was in the Battle of
the Bulge. And in addition to that, my
last assignments in the war when they finally
caught up with the fact that I could do
more than be a typist or jeep driver was
to go into the concentration camps as
they were being liberated, collect the
evidence of the crimes so that they
could have
trials against the offenders as had been
promised by the Allied leaders before
the war ended. And that experience of
going into the camps, hot with the tank troops coming in, had
sadly remained with me.
It's our indescribable, people groveling
in this garbage for a bit food, piled up
skeletons waiting to be burned by the
crematoria like cordwood and digging up
American bodies who'd been shot down by
over German-held territory and had
been murdered by the German mob on the
ground and dumped in the ditch somewhere.
I personally did all those things.
When the war was over I had the
rank of Sergeant of Infantry but I told
the Colonel, "Look just get out of my way.
I don't wear any insignia. I'll get the
job done." And I did. I went home looking
for a job. Suddenly I got a telegram from
the Pentagon, "Dear Sir;"  they never called
me sir before, (laughter) "Please come to Washington
dear sir. We said we'd like you to go
back." Go back where? To Germany? I said, "You get
me back to Germany, you're gonna have to declare
war on Germany again and be losing. (laughter) They said, "We need you."
Benny we need you. I was interviewed by Colonel Mickey Marcus the name may mean something to some of you. He was also a
Jewish boy from the Lower East Side and
he was recruiting people for these trials,
subsequent trial and anyway to make the
long story short I said, "Look I won't
come back into the military. I'll go back
to the civilian with the equivalent rank
and how long do I have to sign up for?"
They say you can quit anytime you want
to and I said, "It's a deal." So I called my
dear girlfriend, fiance if you want to be
fancy
who'd been waiting patiently while I
went through law school and so on, 
who incidentally is a graduate of Hunter
College (applause). She came in as I did, as a poor
immigrant lives in poverty most of our
lives and she became a school teacher and you know in all the areas
around here. It was pretty rough
going at a time when they had
signs on the door "Kill Whitey" and she
couldn't talk about her abortion that
was prohibited and that was the main
concern of the young girls who were
there. Anyway, there I was, assigned to go
into the camps, collect the evidence. I
did collect the evidence and I had the
trial and after that I stayed on to set
up the restitution program. It's- very
little is known about that. We're not all
all victims, not only Jewish victims but
any victim of Nazi crimes. Compensation
was a principle I leaned in the first year
in law school. If you do a harm to
someone you have an obligation to try to
make good. If you can't make good
financially or otherwise, your compatriots
should try to do. So that's the
background from which I come in the
field of human rights. Human Rights is
not just an expression for me; I've seen
what happens if you ignore the respect
that is due to every human being
regardless of his color or his creed and
that has become a firm principle of my
life and everything and I've done. Now I
want to leave a little time to say
something which is bothering me because
we've had these principles, these
declarations- they're beautiful- protect
everybody, everybody live in human and
decent life and all that. 70 years old
today. How far have we come
and why haven't we gone further? What are
the obstacles? Declarations, they don't
help. I mean they're better than nothing
but we have to implement what we are
doing. And so we have some people- America
is a great democracy and there will be
people with differences of opinion.
They'll even let opportunities go by
when we had a chance to elect the first
female president, they goofed on that one too. (applause).
Anyway we have a great democracy. It has differences of
opinion and that's as it should be and
they're entitled to respect. Listen to their
point of view but it doesn't mean you
have to agree and if you disagree, you
state your point of view and let the
public decide. That's the essence of
democracy. Now we have our latest, in the
last few days, a man representing
the President of the United States, now again, a high State Department official -talking
about John Bolton who issued a
declaration, "The ICC is dead and Americans
will never yield to any foreign court
trying our boys- an American." They quote the
Service-members Protection Act which you may be
familiar, saying that if any American is
arrested and taken to the Hague to be
tried by an International Criminal Court
the United States is authorized to use
all necessary means in order to liberate them.
Which means, you can go to war.
The Dutch took a very dim view of that
and the rest of Europe did as well and
one day I got a call from somebody in
Holland: "Today Ben, we're going to protest
against that and we want you to join us.
We're going to set up a barricade on the beach at
Scheveningen, which is in Holland where
the court is and we're gonna wait for
the Americans to attack." (laughter) I said, "How
are you gonna do that?" He said, "Well we're
gonna have papier-mâché dolls with bayonets fixed and
we'll have real sandbags and we're gonna
have the flags of all the hundred
countries who agreed on the court. We're
gonna have the flags there and we're
gonna challenge Mr. Bolton who was an
author of this fine document to come on." I said, "I'll go. I'll
join you on one condition:
that I'm the last speaker and I haul up
the American flag."
They said, "You got a deal." (chuckles and scattered applause). Okay.
So we come to the beach on that day. The American press was nearly
absent. It was a little raining and
they finally go through and every guy
who holds the flags says, "The United States
look they're gonna attack us for try-
for trying to put people on trial for
war crimes. Fork on the United States!"
That's a brief summary. (chuckles) Then it comes my turn and I say, "Look guys and girls,
I didn't come here to attack the United
States. I came here once baring the uniform of the
United States Army and I have come here
to defend the United States because
they've been falsely accused. They've
said the Americans want war. They would
rather come and fight and not let you
put somebody on trial. They'd rather go
to war. That's not the United States! (pounds fist)
That's a small portion of the United States.
The United States is represented and
I want you to join me in saluting the
American flag with the pledge with
liberty and justice for all."
We hold up the flag (applause).
There we have- then we have the problem that we
face in the world today. There has been
tremendous progress and the awakening of
the human conscience, the liberation of
many women, same-sex marriages, all kinds
of things which were considered
impossible but we have made progress in
that direction. The court itself- let me
make another interesting real connection. When I worked to create the
court because it seemed to me logical as a lawyer, if you have a law,
you have a court to enforce it and you have
to have a trial with people who are
responsible. And I made that statement
everywhere I could and got to be known
for that incidentally. My website is my
name Ben Ferencz; everything there is
free, books, articles, motion pictures,
DVDs, BVDs, I don't know what. It's yours; have it-
details, spread around, sell it on the
eBay; I don't care what you do with it.
I want to just jump to where I am. Because
I was so active in creating the Court
itself, when they finally got to their
first case it was Moreno Ocampo
It was a case against Lubanga, a man who
had been seizing children using them as
child soldiers and I made the same pitch
I made in my first case: these are crimes
against humanity, they should not be
tolerated, we have to have a more humane
approach; it's an appeal of humanity to
law. He was convicted and what is
interesting is my first case I was 27,
second one I was 92 (laughter).
I am now 99 years old (applause). So what does it all add up to? We're making progress but we've got a long
way to go. Mr. Bolton, in his diatribe
recently issued, I don't know 10 pages
long, that the ICC's dead, should be dead,
no Americans should be allowed to go
before an American- a foreign Court. We
are noble, we are good, we don't need
these courts. They're just trying to
interfere with our lifestyle and are
are trying to take advantage of us in every
way. And I could hear in my mind,
"Deutschland Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt." Adolf Hitler talking, "We
are a great Germany. We will provide. We will prevail.
They are persecuting us. We don't need
courts. We will decide it for ourselves."
Well, I also remember- I've written a lot
of books and I've been in a lot of courts- my Supreme
Commander in World War Two, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, you may be familiar with
the name of a Republican. And he said in one
of his important speeches in a very real
sense the world can no longer rely on
force. If civilization is to survive, it
must choose the rule of law. That is the
opposite of what Mr. Bolton, acting for
the United States, now preaches. And he's
the one who when the President of the
United States, President Clinton told the Ambassador David Scheffer on New Year's Eve
to go down, hold the UN open so he could
sign onto the court in principle only,
that was done as the last official act
of President Clinton. And a few weeks
later John Bolton speaking again for the
United States
said that doesn't count, cross it out.
Unheard-of in history: defiance of
the signature of a President of the United States by a 
lackey who's important later.
That's the condition today. Well you have
to make the choice: you believe in
Bolton's approach or do you believe in
Eisenhower? I believe in Eisenhower;
he's got a right. And I know that we have
the capacity today from cyberspace to
cut off the electrical grid on planet Earth,
which means we can kill everybody.
Killing Washington, New York, that's easy.
On the whole planet, we now have that
capacity. The Russians have it too. So have the 
Chinese. It's a big secret, was told to me
in very great confidence about 15 years
ago in a conference I had in St.
Petersburg, Russia. So young people and I
speak to them very often are apprised of the
danger to them- no danger to me, I'm
99. Nobody can touch me. Nobody pays me.
Nobody hired me. I'm not for hire. I call
the shots as I see them and I tell the
young people, "Your lives are at stake.
Kids, don't take it." I get standing
ovations. Don't tell me the United States
is against the Court because the kids
are for the Court. It's quite rational; if
somebody's accused of crimes, he's
entitled to go to a court, be presumed
innocent, get a fair trial and get the
punishment that belongs to the crime.
That's the system we tried to set up and
it's a system we have going with all of
its problems and I'm aware of all the
problems and they're difficult. It's like
the Wright brothers saying that put a wing
on a bicycle and it'll fly. Well it
didn't fly but eventually it worked. And
we've got problems with the court; it's
something new and it's expensive and
it's hard to get the witnesses and it's
hard to arrest the criminals because
their heads of state and there's
immunity. There are a lot of problems
wrong with it but we've got the Court.
And it's working. And it may look like its
or undesirable to Mr. John Bolton but how
does it look to you, your bar association
human rights group? I'm proud to be
associated with it. You're calling
together these people who are dedicated
to making it a more humane world. Don't
stop now.
Keep going (applause).
