Thank you very much, member of Parliament.
My name is Chile Eboe-Osuji, and I was the president of the International Criminal Court from 2018 to 2021. I was there for nine years, including the period when I was a judge of the court. Now I teach at the Lincoln Alexander school of law of Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly known as Ryerson.
For my presentation today, I'm going to tell you where I'm going—that would be point B—and then I'll begin from point A. That point B is to say that we've come to a point in international law, and this war in Ukraine has gotten us to that point, where there are some critical adjustments that must be made to that law to deter this kind of behaviour in the future. There are two adjustments I'm proposing.
We have to go back to the Rome Statute, as there is a necessary amendment that needs to be made there because of a certain yawning gap in that statute on the crime of aggression. I'll return to that in a minute.
The second thing I propose we do is this. It is now time to adopt a treaty, as it were, that recognizes the right to peace as an actionable right as opposed to just living it as a mere declaration of a right to peace. If we have an actionable right, it will make wars of aggression less likely in the future.
Let me tell you where I'm going from point A to point B. Point A is history. It has always been the case that the big developments in international law have always occurred after an armed conflict, right from the very beginning of international law itself. You'll find the Thirty Years War and the Eighty Years War that occurred in Europe concluded with that thing some of you will have heard of, the treaty of Westphalia. To international relations experts and political scientists, the treaty of Westphalia of 1648 is credited with being basically the starting point for international law as we recognize it today. It resulted from a war.
We move from there to 1856, the first time that there was any sort of thing in writing about how to regulate war in a humanitarian way. That was something called the Paris Declaration. Again, it resulted from an armed conflict, from the war in Ukraine, in a sense, the Crimean War of 1859 or so. The Lieber Code—again, lots of international lawyers know of that—resulted again from the American Civil War, and that code has informed the development of humanitarian law in very major ways. We move forward to 1864 and the first Geneva Convention. We can keep going, but I have only five minutes.
Let's move it forward then to 1919, the First World War. Everyone recognizes that, and that gave us the League of Nations. For the first time, it was thought that it was a good idea to have a standing international organization that would modulate peace in the world. Skip forward again to 1945, at the end of the Second World War. Again, lots of things happened. The UN, as we know it, resulted from that. The convention against genocide resulted from that. The idea of the recognition of human rights law that we know resulted from that war, as was the idea of responsibility in international law on human beings.