Between Freedom Fighters and Terrorists: The Politics of International Criminal Law in the 1970s

In the 1970s, the development of international criminal law focused heavily on the emergent phenomenon of “terrorism,” which was addressed in a series of discrete international conventions protecting diplomats and civil aviation in particular. Yet for all the success in reaching international agreements concerning specific forms of asymmetric violence it proved far more difficult to reach any international consensus on how to respond to other forms of “terrorism” that emerged in the 1970s, especially the bombing of civilian targets. The United Nations tried and repeatedly failed to craft an international terrorism convention. It took the Council of Europe to craft the first general convention on terrorism in 1977. The paper seeks to explain why the Council of Europe could succeed where the United Nations failed, looking in particular to the context of decolonization and the conflicts over “legitimate” violence in the course of Third World liberation struggles. A UN terrorism convention proved impossible because no consensus could be reached concerning the difference between terrorists and freedom fighters.