Judge Manfred Lachs and His Role in International Adjudication

Karolina Wierczyńska*

I am honoured to present to you Manfred Lachs, one of the most famous Polish jurists in international law. He easily ranks among such great Polish legal scholars as Rafael Lemkin, who coined the word genocide, or the great diplomat Krzysztof Skubiszewski. Manfred Lachs was born1 in 1914, in Stanislawów in Galicia, which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When World War I ended, the town was within the borders of newly independent (and later incorporated into the Soviet Union, while today it is Ivano-Frankovsk in Ukraine). Lachs studied at the of Cracow where he received a Master of Laws, and in 1937 a Doctorate of Laws. Two years later he also received a Doctorate at the University of Nancy in France. Lachs also studied at the London School of Economics.2 When the World War II started he was happily abroad, happily because all his family who stayed in Poland were murdered during the Holocaust. His first book, published in 1945, focused on the issue of war crimes, and it was during this period that he started his international career. Not long after the war he took part in Nuremberg War Trials, serving as one of the authors of the indictment for Nazi crimes in Poland and also working as a member of the Sixth Legal Committee on the Genocide Convention. In the 1950s and 1960s he served as Polish representative in the legal bodies of the (UN), including the Sixth Legal Committee of the General Assembly. He also took part in the work of the International Law Commission, and while working on the Law of Treaties, he was an

* Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland. 1 E. McWhinney, Judge Manfred Lachs and Judicial Law-Making, Opinions of The International Court of Justice, 1967-1993 (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, /London/Boston, 1995) p. 1. 2 O. Schachter, ‘In Memoriam: Judge Manfred Lachs (1914—1993) The UN Years: Lachs the Diplomat’, 87 American Journal of International Law 414 (1993) p. 414.

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Baltic Yearbook of International Law, Volume 7, 2007, pp. 113–119. © Koninklijke Brill N.V. Printed in the Netherlands Karolina Wierczyńska advocate of peremptory norms. Lachs also chaired the Legal Sub-Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which drafted the Outer Space Treaty. He also served as a diplomat in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was one of the authors of the Rapacki Plan for a nuclear free zone in Central Europe. Concurrently he was also a professor of international law at the Polish Academy of Science (where he also was a director of the Institute of Legal Sciences from 1961–1966) and the . It is worth adding that Lachs was a great scholar, teacher and author of several books. One book was The Teacher in International Law,3 which underscored his interest in the theoretical foundation of international law. Lachs loved teaching and loved to spend time with students during lectures or moot courts in the Hague Academy or the Institute of International Law. As his students say,4 he showed law as a dynamic process which must evolve in order to analyze social changes and technological progress from an historical perspective. He believed that we live in an age of renaissance for international law.5 In the article Thoughts on Science, Technology and World Law, which expresses his approach to law and its dynamic, Lachs wrote:

“All I wished to do was to confirm that science and technology have become essential parts of history and the present; that law neither of yesterday nor of today could be studied and understood without taking due account of their vital contribution to the lives of nations and states; that the future will to an even greater degree be dependent on the various methods and tools used to make products of human genius serve the needs and interest of mankind and the international community.”6

3 M. Lachs, The Teacher in International Law (Teachings and Teaching) (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague/London/ Boston, 1982) see also M. Lachs, Rzecz o nauce prawa miedzynarodowego (Wroclaw/Warszawa/Kraków/Gdansk/Lódz´, Zaklad Narodowy Imienia Ossolinskich Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1986). 4 S. K. Chopra, ‘In Memoriam: Judge Manfred Lachs (1914-1993) The Teacher: Lachs at the Hague Academy’, 87 American Journal of International Law 420 (1993) p. 422. 5 M. Lachs, ‘Czy kryzys prawa miedzynarodowego?’ 2 Panstwo i Prawo (1992) p. 18. 6 M. Lachs, ‘Thoughts on Science, Technology and World Law’, 86 American Journal of International Law 673 (1992) p. 699. 114