The Rise and Rise of the United Nations' 1948 "Nuremberg Principles": Consolidating and Destabilizing Wartime Reconfigurations of Sovereignty

This paper analyzes efforts by the international community to codify the lessons of WWII through the "Nuremberg Principles," adopted by the UN in 1948, which included guidelines defining what constitutes a war crime. The 1948 Nuremberg Principles subsequently became an object of heated backlash against multilateralism within the U.S. Senate, however, together with the UN's 1948 Genocide Convention.  The resulting UN project of codifying a binding covenant on Offenses against the Peace and Security of Mankind languished in committees, while the Genocide Convention was not ratified by the U.S. Senate until 1988.  Multilateralist initiatives such as the drive to secure formal U.S. adherence to the Nuremberg Principles and the Genocide Convention were casualties of domestic trends in the United States that mobilized anti-communist rhetoric to resist the penetrations of sovereignty that would bring the international community into domestic spheres of authority.  Nevertheless, the Nuremberg Principles and Genocide Convention underwent a process whereby they became "constitutionalized;" achieving the quasi-constitutional status of "higher law" norms in international society. While these principles are often violated, entities transgressing such norms with impunity face various kinds of formal and informal sanctions, despite the lack of formal ratification at the national level. The paper's title is a tribute to a path-breaking work by the international legal scholar Kirsten Sellars, _The Rise and Rise of Human Rights_ (2002), whose realist analysis of human rights institutions challenges multilateralist arguments for the abatement of traditional conceptions of sovereignty . This paper begins to fill in an analysis of the relevant engines of historical change that could possibly produce such a transformative phenomenon: an international human rights regime where each individual "tree" is weak or ailing, but the overall "forest" is firmly rooted and reshaping the landscape we all survey.