.png)
The Calling of International Law
- Gregory Stanton
- 20 hours ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 1 hour ago
by Dr. Gregory Stanton, Founding President, Genocide Watch
During my second year at Yale Law School, Church World Service called me to become Field Director of its relief program in Cambodia. My roommate from Oberlin College was then the organization’s program director in New York and he knew that I had been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa and had just spent a year in India. After initial reluctance, I said I would pray about it. Despite my resistance, I felt a strong call to accept the assignment. Some of my professors warned that the Khmer Rouge were still all over Cambodia, so I might not return. But my Labor Law professor, Jack Getman, put it plainly. "You don't have any choice, Greg. You've been called."
I landed in Phnom Penh in June 1980. As I walked through the mass graves and talked with the survivors, I realized that the Khmer Rouge had violated every international law on the books, including the Genocide Convention. I had studied with Professors Reisman, MacDougal, and Pospisil at Yale, and knew that law isn’t law without compliance or enforcement. The Khmer Rouge had gotten away with mass murder. There was no political will to capture them in Thailand, and no international court to try them.
Such impunity would only allow the Khmer Rouge to plague Cambodia for years to come. But there was a narrow opening for civil justice, the International Court of Justice. The Khmer Rouge no longer controlled Cambodia because of Vietnam’s intervention, so evidence could be gathered against them. If a case were taken against Cambodia to the World Court for violation of the Genocide Convention, the Khmer Rouge would have to respond, because they still held Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations.
When I returned to Yale, I founded the Cambodian Genocide Project to gather the evidence to make that case possible. I thus began my career in public international law while still a student at Yale Law School. And I found my calling: the prevention and punishment of genocide.
When I started law school, my career objective was to teach international human rights law. After a judicial clerkship, I practiced international corporate law for two years with Foley and Lardner, a Milwaukee law firm. (Yes, I too, was seduced!) That experience taught me how to set up corporations. I was appointed chair of the Young Lawyers’ Division Human Rights Committee of the American Bar Association. I got the Cambodian Genocide Project sponsored by the ABA Young Lawyers’ Division. I was named to the ABA’s Standing Committee on World Order Under Law, which included Edmund Muskie, Cyrus Vance, and Robert Drinan. I wrote Rule of Law letters to the government of South Africa opposing apartheid.
I became a law professor at Washington and Lee University. Law teaching is a good platform for working on international human rights law because it offers both financial security and freedom. But demands of teaching and publishing and the location of most schools away from policy-making centers greatly limit the academician’s ability to create institutions or shape policy.
Rukh, the independence movement of Ukraine asked me to become a legal advisor. I traveled to Ukraine numerous times where I taught Rukh the tactics of non-violent resistance I had learned in the American Civil Rights movement. I gave speeches at many huge rallies in the Maidan in Kyiv. After independence, US Solicitor General Theodore Olson and I went to Ukraine to advise the committee drafting the new Constitution of Ukraine. Both of us recommended a federal system to represent Ukraine’s diverse regions. But the drafters instead adopted a centralized system.
While teaching at Washington and Lee Law School, I got funding to gather evidence in Cambodia from the law school’s research center and the U.S. Institute of Peace. But when it came to finding a government to take the case to the World Court, those of us working on the case struck out. We needed to change the political will of crucial nations, notably the United States, which opposed pursuing the case because it might legitimize the Vietnamese and Soviet-backed government in Phnom Penh.
I learned a crucial lesson:
Human rights are not lost because of the absence of law, but because of the lack of political will to enforce it.
A group of us set out to change the political will of the U.S. government. Prof. Ben Kiernan, Dr. Craig Etcheson, and others formed a coalition called the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge. I co-chaired its Justice Committee. Craig Etcheson worked with Senator Robb to pass the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act. That act declared it to be U.S. policy to prosecute the Khmer Rouge leaders and mandated the opening of an Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations in the State Department. I realized that to get the State Department to really support creation of a Khmer Rouge tribunal, someone needed to push from within the State Department.
In 1992, I took the Foreign Service examination and joined the State Department. I joined the Department because I wanted to build the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and other international human rights institutions. I was fortunate that my assignments allowed me to do that. During my initial consular assignment (Bangkok), the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda broke out. Ambassador Genta Hawkins Holmes, the Director General of the Foreign Service ordered me back to Washington DC and jumped me several grades in the Foreign Service hierarchy. (Most junior Foreign Service Officers would not have been so lucky.) She assigned me to the International Organizations UN Political bureau to coordinate U.S. policy for Africa in the United Nations Security Council. I was also assigned to the steering committee for the Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations. Under Ambassador LaPorta, we moved U.S. policy to support creation of a tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge.
After returning to Washington, I was immediately lent to the U.N. Commission of Experts that investigated the Rwandan genocide. We went to Rwanda, and I co-wrote the U.N. Commission’s preliminary report. We recommended establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). I then drafted U.N. Security Council Resolutions 955 and 978, which created the ICTR. I became the U.S. liaison and troubleshooter during its difficult start-up in Arusha, Tanzania. I also initiated and wrote the U.N. resolutions that created the Burundi Commission of Inquiry and the U.N. Commission on Arms Flows in Central Africa. These were all institutional contributions to the punishment and prevention of genocide.
The Acting Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, my boss, was one of the four people who ordered Madeleine Albright, our UN Ambassador, to vote to withdraw all UN troops from Rwanda at the beginning of the Rwandan genocide. Secretary of State Albright later asked me to interview everyone who had made our Rwanda policy and report on why “we made these mistakes.” I learned that the US had thousands of US Marines right off the coast of East Africa at the beginning of the genocide. If President Clinton had ordered those U.S. Marines to reinforce the U.N. Mission in Rwanda as General Dallaire asked, they could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. My report to Secretary Albright analyzed why the State Department refused to recommend intervention. An unclassified version I later wrote at the Woodrow Wilson Center was published as “Could the Rwandan Genocide Have Been Prevented?”
My State Department supervisor read my report on US Rwanda policy. He was furious. When I invited General Dallaire to the State Department to talk to policy makers about the genocide in Rwanda, my supervisor tried to block the General’s coming right up to his departure from the airport at Montreal. In my annual Foreign Service evaluation for 1994, my supervisor recommended that I be “immediately terminated” from the State Department “because Stanton does not understand that the State Department is a hierarchical institution.” (Of course I knew that!) On the same day I received that evaluation, the Foreign Service Association, our union, awarded me its W. Averell Harriman Award for “extraordinary contributions to the practice of diplomacy exemplifying intellectual courage.” My supervisor prohibited anyone from our bureau to attend my award ceremony.
Foreign Service Junior Officers come up for tenure review after six years. In 1998, due to my supervisor’s 1994 evaluation, I was denied tenure. Also in 1998, President Clinton ordered our War Crimes Ambassador to vote against the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In 1999, I resigned from the State Department.
Tribunals are always too late. And national governments seldom see beyond their own national interests. It became clear to me that more lasting institutions are necessary to prevent genocide. What is needed is a global Anti-Genocide Movement with an effective early warning system for the U.N. and governments, standing regional or U.N. rapid deployment forces that can intervene to stop genocides, and an International Criminal Court. The U.S. government stood opposed to both a U.N. force and an International Criminal Court.
I left the State Department to join the World Federalist Association USA and became Co-chair of the Washington Working Group for the International Criminal Court. We built a coalition of human rights, legal, veterans, and religious organizations that got help from former President Jimmy Carter and successfully lobbied the Clinton administration to sign the ICC treaty. President George W. Bush promptly unsigned it. Republicans have continued to oppose the ICC. But Democratic presidents have increasingly cooperated with the ICC. However, the ICC still lacks a police force, which should be created by its Assembly of States Parties through an Optional Protocol to the ICCs Rome Statute.
I became an advisor to the task force appointed by the government of Cambodia to negotiate with the U.N. and create the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, popularly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT.) Using models from other tribunals, Cambodian legal procedure, and the International Criminal Court, I drafted the Internal Rules of Procedure for the Tribunal. Revised by judges of the tribunal, they became the rules of the KRT. Offices and a large courtroom were built for the KRT, and trials began. Over thirty years after they committed their crimes, a mixed U.N./Cambodian tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) finally convicted three top Khmer Rouge leaders of crimes against humanity and genocide.
The lesson I learned from the Cambodian Genocide Project is that ideas that change the world often take many years and the work of hundreds of people to come to fruition.
Never hesitate to plant the seeds. Then ask for help to water them until they take root and are tended by many other people.
I returned to academia to earn my living as the James Farmer Professor in Human Rights at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. In 2007, I became President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. In 2009, I became Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution in Arlington, Virginia.
In 1999, I founded Genocide Watch to build a world Anti-Genocide Movement, with an international coalition of NGOs to prevent genocide. At the Hague Appeal for Peace in 1999, The International Campaign to End Genocide was founded with Genocide Watch as its coordinator. Since then, the Alliance Against Genocide, as it is now called, has grown to 130 member organizations around the world, including such heavyweights as The International Crisis Group, the Minority Rights Group, Survival International, and the Aegis Trust. We proposed and lobbied successfully to create the Office of the Special Adviser to the U.N. Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide. Kofi Annan created the office in 2004.
Genocide Watch and the Alliance have campaigned to stop or prevent several genocides.
• East Timor, where we were instrumental in getting Australian and ASEAN intervention;
• Ethiopia, where we got US pressure to stop the 2003 genocide against the Anuak in Gambella;
• Côte d’Ivoire, where our coalition persuaded the French government to intervene to prevent civil war;
• Macedonia, where UN and NATO peacekeepers prevented war in Kosovo from spilling into Macedonia;
• Darfur, Sudan, where UN/AU peacekeepers and referrals to the ICC temporarily suspended a genocide;
• Iraq and Syria, where Congress urged more US support for NATO and Kurdish forces to defeat ISIS.
In 2025, Genocide Watch launched several initiatives:
• UN General Assembly resolutions under the Uniting for Peace procedure on Sudan and Gaza.
• Invocation of Article 109 of the UN Charter to write a post-colonial UN Charter without Perm-5 Security Council vetoes and with an elected General Assembly.
• Creation of a public benefit corporation with the UN and AI companies to develop Artificial Intelligence to recognize and answer hate speech.
• Lawsuits in several countries against social media companies for incitement to commit genocide.
This coming year, I hope to turn Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide over to new leadership.
I have this advice for those considering the calling of international law:
At times you may feel intimidated, because you are taking a less traditional path than your colleagues or because the jobs you seek don’t pay well or are not well recognized among your family or friends. During those hard moments, seek out students, professors, and activists in similar positions. It is very likely that they have experienced the same fears and hesitations. But while you can get good advice from mentors, the ultimate decision is yours. At that time, evaluate whether your choice is compatible with your values and convictions. Make sure you are being true to the person you were when you came to law school and the person you aspire to be after you receive your degree.
Be ready to pursue your dreams into whatever jobs they may take you. But never take a job from which you will not have the integrity to resign.
Never underestimate your own ideas. The world is governed by people with smaller ideas than your own. Yours may change the world.
Copyright 2025 Gregory H Stanton
Published under Creative Commons copyright. May be republished with credit to the author by non-profit organizations in its entirety without alterations. Profit-making publications must obtain a license from Genocide Watch to republish.