Foreword to the first edition

• Author: William A Schabas
• Pages: 19-23

xix

FOREWORD

to the First Edition

This book is an innovation as far as Canadian legal practitioners,

scholars, and law students are concerned. Academics from France, for

example, have for many years published lengthy manuals covering the

f‌ield of Droit international pénal, but I cannot think of a country from

the common law tradition with anything similar. The Americans have

their case books, containing lengthy excerpts from judgments and

hypotheticals for classroom discussion, but nothing along the lines of

a comprehensive monograph.

Nothing could seem more appropriate today, given Canada’s pro-

found, and in some ways, pioneering role in the related disciplines that

Robert Currie accurately distinguishes with the labels “international

criminal law” and “transnational criminal law.” In recent times, Canad a

has been very much at the forefront, but this was not always the case.

Although essentially idiosyncratic developments concerning inter-

national criminal prosecution date back to the Middle Ages, there was

nothing resembling the f‌ield as it now exists until the Paris Peace Con-

ference of 1919. Ambitious plans to prosecute war criminals for the

ancestors of what we now call genocide, crimes against humanity, and

aggression were set out in the post-war treaties, but these plans were

never properly implemented. Nothing signif‌icant is known about the

Canadian position in this area. Our country was present at Versailles,

but f‌ledgling Canadian d iplomats were still to some extent oper ating in

the shadow of the British Empire. Intern ational criminal law must have

been a remote concern to them.