international crimes and other gross violations of human rights
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Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG)
International Human Rights Law
International crimes and other GVHR
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Discussion Points International crimes and other GVHR
Questions
1. What can we learn from the fact that one soldier shot himself deliberately in the foot?
He found to shoot himself in the feet easier than to break the chain of command (saying to
your supervisor ‘hey we are doing the wrong thing’). This shows the pressure on the soldiers.
2. Who stopped the massacre and why? How can you explain this?
The others stopped the massacre, because they were not part of the social context and the
way Charlie Company soldiers started to see it. They were above with the helicopter and saw
that these people were actually civilians.
3. Why is the quote: ‘we were supposed to be the good guys’ so telling?
They went there to do the right thing, but then in the end did the wrong thing. Always keep
questioning yourself if you really are doing the right thing.
Final note: we need to understand what and how it happened, not as an excuse, but to
understand in order to prevent!
How can we explain that between the Nuremberg tribunals and the establishment for the
tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and former Rwanda nothing happened?
® The Cold war made it very difficult for the Soviet-Union and USA to agree on anything.
Internationally there was simply no agreement. The SC played an important role to
protect peace and security, but a lot of things were hampered by the Soviet-Union and
the USA, with veto right for example. Then the establishment for the tribunals for the
former Yugoslavia and former Rwanda happened, by SC resolution acting under
Chapter VII. That is what they used to establish these two tribunals. This is where
international criminal law took off.
, Discussion points Milgram:
Can laboratory experiments like Milgram’s obedience experiment help explain events like the
Holocaust? .
® Not a yes or no answer = an academic debate
® Some people say no we cannot learn from these experiments, because social life is way more
complex.
® Others said, that despite the fact that in real life it is more complex, but we still learn about the
mechanism called obedience, draw a parallel to what happened in real life.
® Discussion about the 65%, does that show that 35% are not obedient? Milgram shows that many
factors can influence obedience, but in real life could be more complex. Obedience shifts
® Another problem: some people do not really understand what Milgram said, some say Milgram
was about blind obedience and Holocaust is not, but Milgram was not about blind obedience, it
might have been perceiving as such, but you see that trust in authorities. The experimenter
requested, did not give orders. Which is something different.
Practical Application: online
Milgram's discovery about the unexpectedly powerful human tendency to obey authorities can be
applied to real life in several different ways. First, it provides a reference point for certain
phenomena that, on the face of it, strain our understanding-thereby, making them more plausible.
Clearly, the implications of Milgram's research have been greatest for understanding of the
Holocaust. For example, a historian, describing the behavior of a Nazi mobile unit roaming the Polish
countryside that killed 38,000 Jews in cold blood at the bidding of their commander, concluded that
"many of Milgram's insights find graphic confirmation in the behavior and testimony of the men of
Reserve Police Battalion 101." Second, in his obedience studies, Milgram obtained a rare kind of
result-one that people can apply to themselves to change their behavior, or at least to gain greater
insight into themselves. Countless people who have learned about the obedience research have been
better able to stand up against arbitrary or unjust authority. Third, the obedience experiments have
been widely used in various domains to create broader organizational changes in large segments of
society. Some textbooks on business ethics have used those experiments to warn students about the
unethical demands that might be made on them by their bosses in the business world. Also, several
Supreme Court briefs, as well as over 180 law reviews have referenced them. A frequent argument
contained in these sources is that laws requiring police officers to obtain voluntary consent to
conduct searches are essentially toothless. Drawing on Milgram's findings, they argue that, given our
extreme readiness to obey authority, a person is not very likely to question a police officer's right to
search him or his house when he is requested to. Perhaps the most consequential use of the
obedience studies by the legal profession was during a South African trial in the late 1980s of 13
defendants accused of murder during mob actions. Expert testimony that obedience to authority and
other social-psychological processes were extenuating circumstances, resulted in 9 of the 13
defendants' being spared the death penalty.
A fourth, and final, application of Milgram's research is that it suggests specific preventive actions
people can take to resist unwanted pressures from authorities:
Milgram’s invention of his experiments and the Nazis’ invention of the Holocaust share a key
similarity: Both successfully transformed large numbers of “ordinary” and arguably indifferent
people into willing inflictors of harm. Therefore, if it were possible to delineate Milgram’s start-to-
finish journey in transforming most of his participants into inflictors of harm on a likeable person,
perhaps my findings might offer some insight into how only moderately antisemitic Germans so
quickly became willing executioners.
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