If one wants to understand what is now happening on the human rights front and this "spreading with extraordinary speed" that Kissinger laments, one should return to the abolition of slavery. As the British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson observed in his book Crimes against Humanity, "The precise point at which slavery became prohibited by international law is impossible to fix: there was no defining moment ? but rather an accumulation of treaties throughout the nineteenth century and a gradual abandonment by the great powers of their toleration of the practice."
The world is now apparently going through another great change. Although it has not yet led to the prohibition by law of war or nuclear weapons, it has in effect led to the outlawing many of the accouterments of war as we have known it in the twentieth century. Torture, rape, genocide, crimes against humanity and even aggression all fall within the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court, which is set to take over the work of the ad hoc criminal courts for ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, once its founding treaty is ratified by sixty countries -- as will probably happen within the next two years.
The age of impunity for heads of governments and their senior officials is coming to a close. Kissinger clearly finds this a most surprising development. In what sounds like a desperate plea he argues, "Any universal system should contain procedures not only to punish the wicked but also to contain the righteous." For him the human rights movement is now in danger of descending into a witch-hunt.
Honorable men and women who served their country responsibly should not find it difficult to sleep at night or to travel wherever they want. But, Kissinger, the world has become a different place, thanks in part to the human rights lobby, but also thanks to the overwhelming majority of governments everywhere, including, it must be said again, your own.
Jonathan Power is a freelance columnist based in London.
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