Prosecuting Evil

The way history is taught today, it's easy to image that after the Second World War reached its conclusion and the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, everybody knew what to do next and events followed a logical path. If anything, the opposite was true. Amidst the chaos involved in trying to provide urgently needed food and medicine, and support and rehabilitate millions of displaced people, another difficult question arose: what should be done with all the captured enemy personnel? In previous wars they would ave been summarily executed (perhaps after being tortured), locked up indefinitely or simply allowed to disperse. There was no process for dealing with such things, especially not on the scale that presented itself - yet the victorious Allies felt it necessary to create one as a means of restoring the rule of law. The task of doing so fell, in large part, to then 27-year-old lawyer Benjamin Ferencz.

Now aged 99, Ferencz remains active in the service of human rights causes. It's partly thanks to him that the concept of human rights law exists. One rarely encounters an anti-war activist (in the general rather than the specific sense) who can come up with a credible alternative, yet Ferencz believes passionately that it is possible for any human dispute, no matter its scale, to be resolved through the courts rather than on the battlefield - as long as the necessary structures are in place. His fierce intellect enables him to make a pretty impressive argument for this.

At a time when heads of state in prominent Western nations are openly challenging the rule of law, Barry Avrich's documentary could not be more timely. It's a detailed portrait of a remarkable man who was active far beyond the Nuremberg trials themselves and continued to play a leading role in the struggle to protect people's human rights and civil liberties. Avrich follows him from his childhood as a Jewish immigrant in Hell's Kitchen, a short kid with a broad smile and a strong sense of justice, to his successful pursuit of a scholarship at a university whose international reputation he was barely aware of, his accidental induction into war crimes investigations and the decades of work that followed. He examines the fortitude required to look through ream upon ream of intensely distressing evidence and the satisfaction of ensuring that the culprits got what they deserved.

Avrich has managed to find an impressive number of contemporaries to talk about a man of this age, and he also does a good job of contextualising his story with archive footage, photographs and contemporary accounts. The film is detailed and leaves few questions unanswered. It will be particularly appealing to those with an interest in law but despite the complexity of some of the ideas under discussion it's accessible enough for a general audience and engaging throughout. Although Avrich comes across as perhaps a little too much in awe of his subject, Ferencz himself has no pretensions and there's a warmth to him that keeps the film from becoming depressing despite the horror inherent in some of its subject matter. This is, ultimately, a film full of hope - that with sufficient hard work, the darker aspects of our nature might eventually give way to reason.