Foreword to the first edition

AuthorWilliam A Schabas
Pages19-23
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.

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