One Story

80 years ago this year, prosecutors at the first war crimes trials in Nuremberg were piecing together evidence of the barbarism and brutality of the Nazi state. David Maxwell Fyfe, who led the British prosecution team, went on to become one of two 'artisans' of the European Convention on Human Rights. His grandson Tom Blackmore explores parallels between the evidence of Nuremberg and the articles included in the Convention, and describes how for David, the evidence of Nuremberg and the drafting of the Convention were one story.

Eighty years ago the prosecutors at Nuremberg were piecing together for the first time a picture of the barbarism and brutality of the Nazi state. There was a mountain of evidence to work their way through – not just paper but images and film – as they prepared their case proving crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The scale of horror provoked the emergence of a new language including genocide and Holocaust.

Inevitably there was a degree of chaos as the four prosecution teams - British, American, French, and Soviet, made their case to the Tribunal, laying out the charges and evidence. It was hard to grapple with the scope of the evidence, and how to cross-examine the defendants who were implicated with actions that were barely human. And yet who themselves had been offered justice.

One prosecutor, who was to step into the spotlight at the Tribunal with his cross-examination of Goering recognised the need to protect the people of Europe from a repeat of the Nazi madness. As he forensically studied the evidence some crimes stood out.

• Mass state sponsored murder demanded that citizens and strangers must have a right to life.

• Wholesale torture demanded protection from torture.

• Millions put into slavery demanded the prohibition of slavery

• Countless communities imprisoned with no redress to the law or justice demanded that there should be no punishment without law, a right to a fair trial underpinned by a right to liberty and security.

• Communities othered and cast off demanded the right to marry by choice and live quietly in private family life

• Deep unfettered discrimination demanded that all should have to freedom to think, discern, judge and believe for themselves.

For Maxwell Fyfe the evidence of Nuremberg and the drafting of the Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms were one story. It was a story of the conquest of tyranny and the establishment of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Looking back, in his autobiography, A Political Adventure, he wrote:

I do not want to be a boring ‘proud father’, but I think that I am entitled to be glad that I have done something positive as well as negative in regard to tyranny, which so many of my generation in the twentieth century have accepted without a murmur.

And it was the story of an awakening realisation of the need for nations to work more closely in a changing world.

I argued that the Convention should set out a short list of basic personal rights, to be acknowledged by all governments, and a minimum standard of democratic conduct for all its members. This would provide the moral basis for the activities of the Council.

I was very anxious that we should get an international sanction in Europe behind the maintenance of these basic decencies of life.

Nuremberg painted a picture of a Germany overrun by Nazis who struck at the roots of the freedoms of all. It showed what it would be like to live in such a world, and it wasn’t a comfortable portrait.

This was the story of the world striving to be free from war, torture, slavery, the prohibition of free thought and faith, and the fracturing of society through fear and hate. It was the evidence that :

Our lunatic century is looking for a way of guaranteeing ordinary people a quiet life.