Preface and Acknowledgments

• Author: Robert J. Currie
• Profession: Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University
• Pages: 25-30

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PREFACE AND

ACK NOW LED GEM ENTS

As I began to tell friends and colleagues that I was w riting a book on

international and tran snational criminal law, the response tended to

be that this sounded very interesting, “war crimes stuff and all that.” A

few ventured that this must be something of a rarif‌ied f‌ield of law, even

obscure. Twenty years ago, they would have been correct; international

crimina l law rested on the aging edif‌ice of the Charter of the Inte rna-

tional Military Tribunal (Nuremberg) and the Eichmann tr ial, as well as

a few war crimes treaties that rarely saw any tra ff‌ic; the International

Criminal Court was still just an idea; and tran snational crimin al law

was a mixed bag of treaties on specif‌ied acts, along with old extradition

treaties and some scratchings at inter-state ev idence-gathering cooper-

ation. The Canadian law and practice on point was mostly moribund.

What a difference two decade s can make. As I write th is preface,

the world is celebrating the anniversa ry of the fall of the Berli n Wall,

twenty years ago to the day. While the end of the Cold War was not the

only prime mover in the revival of this f‌ield, it is a historical marker

that prefaced a time of signif‌icant development in international as well

as transnational criminal law. As this book was going to press, a sitting

head of state wa s under indictment by a perm anent and functioning In-

tern ational Crimin al Court , a former he ad of stat e was bei ng tried by the

Special Cour t for Sierra Leone, and R adovan Karadzić was t angling with

the Inter national Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia over his

conduct of his own defence on genocide charges. In Canada, a bill was

going through Parli ament t hat was designed, in part, to allow Canada