Lawyers’ Activism, International Law, and Human Rights in the Cold War Era: The Emergence of Radical Legal Internationalism
Keywords:
International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Human rights, Cold War, International law, Radical legal internationalismAbstract
The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), founded in Paris in 1946 by a group of antifascist lawyers, has long been dismissed as a Soviet front organization. Yet, this characterization overlooks its complex and multifaceted history. This paper reassesses IADL’s first thirty years, exploring its origins, internal debates, and cross-border engagement. Drawing on archival records, this article argues that—despite a period of Communist influence—the IADL contributed to international legal and political discourse by advancing an original approach defined here as radical legal internationalism. Through this framework, IADL lawyers questioned Cold War ideological boundaries and brought into dialogue Communist, progressive, New Left, decolonial, and liberal rights traditions. The article also uncovers the IADL’s significant role in promoting international law and human rights through trial observation, UN advocacy, and missions of inquiry. In challenging the dominant account of the Left’s delayed and uneasy embrace of human rights, this article calls for a broader understanding of Cold War-era legal internationalism and highlights an alternative tradition of legal activism.
References
1
Vladimír Kabeš and Alfons Sergot, Blueprint of Deception: Character and Record of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1957), 5–6. It is important to mention that this text was written by Vladimír Kabeš, a Czech anticommunist refugee who was on the payroll of the CIA-sponsored International Commission of Jurists, and Alfons Sergot, a legal scholar and later a professor at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. Although the book was intended as a work of propaganda, it contains a wealth of factual information about the IADL, likely gathered through infiltration. When carefully cross-checked and stripped of ideological commentary, these details prove to be highly valuable.
2
International Commission of Jurists, Under False Colours: A Report on the Character of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (The Hague: ICJ, 1955), 1–3, 20.
3
Otto Kirchheimer, Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 257.
4
Mikael Rask Madsen, “« Make law, not war ». Les « sociétés impériales » confrontées à l’institutionnalisation internationale des droits de l’homme,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 151–152 (2014): 96–106; Liora Israël, Robes noires, années sombres : avocats et magistrats en résistance pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 414.
5
See, as examples of this paper’s approach, Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in the Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19 (2010): 547–573; Phillip Deery, “The Left and the International Arena: The Rosenberg Case,” Leftist Internationalisms: A Transnational Political History, ed. Michele Di Donato and Mathieu Fulla (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 191–204; Celia Donert, “From Communist Internationalism to Human Rights: Gender, Violence and International Law in the Women’s International Democratic Federation Mission to North Korea, 1951,” Contemporary European History 25 (2016): 313–333. The human rights’ chronology is borrowed from Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 122–130.
6
The eclecticism of this article’s sources—both private and institutional, drawn from American and European archives—is intentional: it is meant to foster a more polyphonic reconstruction of the IADL’s history and enable extensive cross-checking. While fully aware of the political sensitivity of these materials and skeptical of any claim to hermeneutic neutrality, the author advocates for an evidence-based approach to understanding the evolution of international law and its institutions. Such an approach must rest on a transparent method of inquiry, a limited notion of objectivity, and a critical analysis of the available evidence. See, along these lines, Marek Tamm, “Truth, Objectivity and Evidence in History Writing” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2014): 265–290. For a critical standpoint, see Anne Orford, International Law and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 285–320.
7
Michele Di Donato and Mathieu Fulla, “Introduction: Leftist Internationalisms in the History of the Twentieth Century,” in Leftist Internationalisms, ed. Di Donato and Fulla, 1–22.
8
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–26.
9
Moyn, The Last Utopia, in particular 7–9. For a multi-layered explanation of the “1970s human rights moment,” see Jan Eckel, “The Rebirth of Politics from the Spirit of Morality: Explaining the Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s,” in The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, ed. Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 226–259. A similar interpretation, though based on the notion of a leftist “ethical turn” after the failure of the 1968 mobilizations, can be found in Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007). For a different, non-Western angle, see Decolonization, Self-determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights, ed. A. Dirk Moses, Marco Duranti, Roland Burke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
10
Samuel Moyn, “Michael Ratner’s Tragedy, and Ours,” The New York Review, September 1, 2021.
11
Martin Popper, “International Association of Democratic Lawyers,” Lawyers Guild Review 6 (1946): 572–575.
12
Joë Nordmann and Anne Brunel, Aux vents de l’histoire (Arles: Actes Sud, 1996), 181–184, 225–226. See also Liora Israël, “Nordmann Joë,” in the biographic dictionary Le Maitron https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article146518. All translations from French texts are mine.
13
See the reminiscences of the Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the USSR at Nuremberg, Lev Smirnov, “The Nuremberg Trials at the Present Day,” Review of Contemporary Law [henceforth, RCL], no. 2 (1976): 13–23. See also Robert H. Jackson, “Lawyers Today: The Legal Profession in a World of Paradox,” American Bar Association Journal 33 (1947): 24–27, 85–89. On the Soviets at Nuremberg, see Francine Hirsch, “The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 701–730.
14
Marcel Merle, “Nuremberg, Twenty Years Later,” RCL 14, no. 1 (1967): 13–20.
15
See Cassin in Bulletin of the IADL, XX th Anniversary of the I.A.D.L.: A Report about the Commemorating Meeting at UNESCO House (Paris – January 20, 1967) (Brussels: IADL, n.d. but 1967), 11.
16
Joë Nordmann, “The International Association of Democratic Lawyers Is Thirty Years Old,” RCL, no. 1 (1976): 117–124.
17
86th Congress, 1st Session, House of Representatives, Proceedings against Martin Popper. September 3, 1959, Report 1135, Serial Set 12164, Session 7, 13.
18
Officially, the meeting was convened by the French National Judiciary Movement. Masterminded by Nordmann, the organization was the successor to the National Front of Jurists, founded during World War II to unite antifascist lawyers.
19
Kabeš and Sergot, Blueprint of Deception, 19–21.
20
CIA, Facts About International Communist Front Organisations, March, 1955, 36, CIA-RDP78-02646R000400340001-6, CIA Historical Collections, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/historical-collections.
