The Hague versus Nuremberg: Lessons from the Peace Palace, Rundstein and Meijers, Builders of Transitional Civil Justice after the World Wars

In the Netherlands, we commemorate that on 26^th November 1940 Rudolph Cleveringa, Dean of the Law Faculty of Leiden University, protested against the anti-Jewish decrees under German occupation. Less known is his speech in 1947, proposing an 'International Court of Civil Justice' in the post-war world. This idea referred to extensive debates among international lawyers, responding to the violent revolutions and extreme injustice in European societies since the First World War. A main venue was the Peace Palace in The Hague, hosting the still fragile institutions for 'peace through international justice'.

This paper discusses the views of two eminent jurists, the Polish State Councillor Szymon Rundstein and the Dutch legal reformer Eduard Meijers. Rundstein, member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, put forward the idea of international civil arbitration in a lesson for the Hague Academy of International Law in 1928. Meijers gave a lesson in 1934, elaborating his vision on revitalizing the Hague Conference on Private International Law, created in 1893 for protecting 'vital right of citizens'. Both scholars opposed the effects of the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 in Nazi Germany, coming to different conclusions about the future of civil law.

Rundstein, refusing to leave the Warsaw Ghetto on 1939, was deported in August 1942 and murdered with his family in Treblinka. Meijers was deported with his family in the same month, to Westerbork and afterward to Theresienstadt, where he elaborated principles of the new Dutch Civil Code. Today, Meijer's Code offers a model for newly independent and transition countries. After the breakdown of the Iron Curtain in the 1990's, Rundstein's work has been rediscovered as a basis for transition justice in post-Communist societies. The bottom-line is, in the words of Hannah Arendt, to protect people's 'right to have rights' as citizens.