Few British lawyers have a better understanding of genocide than Sir Howard Morrison KCMG CBE KC. In 2016, as a judge of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, he voted to convict the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić on one charge of genocide and acquit him on another. On the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks, the international lawyer said he was concerned to see the legal definition of genocide being watered down in public discourse.
The main purpose of our interview was to discuss Morrison’s latest appointment as co-chair of the newly established Council for the Examination of Atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For three decades, he told me, the Congolese people had endured atrocities on a scale reminiscent of the darkest chapters of the modern history. And yet the world has hardly registered this. The council’s task was to raise international awareness, to make an accurate historical record and — “hopefully, eventually” — to provide reparations for victims.
The Democratic Republic of Congo — DRC for short — had suffered two civil wars between 1996 and 2003, following the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. During just 100 days in 1994, about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were systematically killed by Hutu militias in Rwanda. But Tutsi forces then seized control and some two million Hutus, including civilians and some of those responsible for the genocide, fled across the border to what is now the DRC.
The conflict there has worsened in recent years. As Morrison told me, the latest international violence involves a battle for eastern DRC’s huge mineral resources.
International Criminal Court
My picture shows Morrison in his robes as a judge of the International Criminal Court, where he sat from 2012 to 2021. He told me last week he had been disappointed by the way the court had handled the allegations of sexual misconduct against its former prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, that led to Khan’s dismissal last month. Morrison did not believe the lengthy process had been fair or impartial.
More generally, the court had not achieved everything it might have done during its first quarter-century, he thought, because some of the world’s “big players” had chosen not to join it. As one of its former judges, Morrison took the view that “mature democracies” had nothing to fear from a court of last resort that was not allowed to intervene when countries were dealing properly with allegations against their own citizens.
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