William Anthony Schabas, OC (born 19 November 1950) is a Canadian academic specialising in international criminal and human rights law. He is professor of international law at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom, professor of international human law and human rights at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an internationally respected expert on human rights law, genocide and the death penalty.
Schabas also sits on the advisory board of the Israel Law Review,Israel Law Review, Editorial Board, Cambridge Journals the Journal of International Criminal JusticeJournal of International Criminal Justice, Oxford Journals and is editor-in-chief of Criminal Law Forum, the quarterly journal of the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law.Criminal Law Forum, Universiteit Leiden He is a member of the board of trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights. Schabas served as one of seven commissioners on the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and as one of six commissioners on the Iran Tribunal Truth Commission from 18 to 22 June 2012.
In 2014, Schabas was appointed the head of a UN Committee investigating the role of Israel in the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict. The appointment was criticized by Canada's Foreign Minister, John Baird, and the Geneva-based advocacy NGO UN Watch, on the basis of allegations that Schabas was anti-Israel, a charge he denied. In February 2015 he resigned after an Israeli complaint that he provided legal advice to the Palestine Liberation Organization in 2012. Schabas had been hired as a consultant to provide a legal analysis regarding the Palestinian bid for non-member observer status at the United Nations. Schabas stated that he was resigning to stop the controversy from overshadowing the work of the Gaza inquiry, whose results were due in March. Avigdor Lieberman hailed his resignation as an 'achievement for Israeli diplomacy'.Herb Keinon, "Schabas takes parting shot at 'masters of ridiculous statements' Netanyahu, Liberman ," Jerusalem Post, 3 February 2015.
In late 2019, Schabas defended the nation of Myanmar at the International Court of Justice in The Hague against charges of genocide towards its Rohingya population, brought by the republic of Gambia.
Early life and education Schabas was born in Cleveland, Ohio to an Ashkenazi Jewish father. His family name, which is a variation of the Yiddish word for "Sabbath" ("Shabbos" in Yiddish, derived from "Shabbat" in Hebrew), has been interpreted as perhaps suggesting also a Sephardic connection.Nathan Guttman, "8 Things You Didn't Know About The U.N. War Crimes Commission," The Forward 15 August 2015. His mother, Ann (née Fairley), was born in Canada and served as dean of the Faculty of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Toronto. His father, Ezra Schabas, is an American-born Canadian musician and author. His maternal grandparents were Barker Fairley, an English-born painter and scholar, and Margaret Fairley, a writer and educator also born in England. His paternal grandparents came from Galicia, and relatives on his father's side were murdered in the Holocaust."Former Head of Inquiry Into Gaza War Says He Faced Pressure and Threats", by Marlise Simons, The New York Times, 11 FEB. 2015
Ezra Schabas moved his family to Toronto in 1952; consequently, William Schabas grew up in Toronto and received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from the University of Toronto, and LL.B., LL.M. and LL.D. degrees from the Université de Montréal. He has also been awarded honorary doctorates by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland and Northwestern University, Chicago.
According to UN Watch, when Schabas was a PhD student in history at the University of Toronto in 1974, and a leader in the SDS group, he was the subject of a university investigation for allegedly violating human rights and freedoms by physically obstructing a visiting Harvard professor from speaking on campus. Schabas was suspended from the university for four years, later reduced to two.
Career From 1991 to 2000 he was a professor of human rights law and criminal law at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), and he chaired the Department of Legal Studies from 1994 to 1998. He has taught as a visiting or adjunct professor at several other institutions, including McGill University, Queen's University Belfast, LUISS University in Rome, Cardoza Law School, Panthéon-Assas University and the National University of Rwanda.
Schabas moved to Ireland in 2000, serving as the director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, until 2011. That year he moved to London to take up a chair in international law at Middlesex University, London. He is the recipient of the Vespasian V. Pellat Medal for International Criminal Justice of the Association international de droit penal and the gold medal in the Social Sciences of the Royal Irish Academy. Schabas was called to the Quebec bar in 1985 and practised law in Montreal for many years. He has also practised at the international level, appearing before the International Court of Justice, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court. Schabas was invited by the Special Court for Sierra Leone to serve as an amicus curiae.
He has written over 18 monographs and 200 articles. In 2009 he was elected President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, as well as holding a position on the board of directors of the International Institute for Criminal InvestigationWilliam Schabas, CV, Middlesex University and René Cassin, a non-government organisation that presents a Jewish voice on human rights.William Schabas, CV., Middlesex University Schabas has authored more than 350 academic journal articles. He has also delivered lectures or conference papers in more than fifty countries. His writings have been cited in judgments, decisions and opinions of: International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Special Court for Sierra Leone, European Court of Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Supreme Court of Canada, United States Supreme Court, Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, High Court of Tanzania and Supreme Court of Israel.William Schabas, CV Middlesex University
Schabas has participated on several human rights fact-finding missions on behalf of international non-governmental organisations, such as Amnesty International and the International Federation of Human Rights, to such countries as Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, South Africa and Russia. The 1993 mission to Rwanda, of which he was a member, alerted the international community to the danger of genocide in that country.
In 2011, Schabas attended a conference in Iran with the Tehran-based Non-Aligned Movement Center for Human Rights and Cultural Diversity where he was a keynote speaker. It was reported that the center has close ties with former Iranian president President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He attended the conference together with US film producer Sandra Schulberg in order to present a documentary film about the Nuremberg Trial to Iranians, which was welcomed by the audience, and spoke to them about the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities.Non-aligned Movement Center for Human Rights and Cultural Diversity, ' Non-aligned Movement Center for Human Rights and Cultural Diversity Annual Report 2011,'Namiran February 2012 Schabas states that he went as an academic, and is opposed to academic boycotts of Israel and Iran.
In December 2019, the Republic of The Gambia filed charges of genocide against Myanmar. Led by justice minister Abubacarr Tambadou and with the support of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the former international criminal lawyer alleged that a genocide against the Rohingya people took place in Myanmar between 2016 and 2017. William Schabas, who in 2010 had collaborated on a report detailing systematic attacks against the Rohingya and concluding that they met the international threshold of crimes against humanity, stood in defense of the Asian nation, leading to criticism.
Legal and political positions Overview An interview with Schabas in the journal Intellectum offers a concise overview of his opinions on Israeli operations in Gaza, the Goldstone Report, racism in Europe, the death penalty, genocide, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone, the International Criminal Court and its arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir of Sudan, and international criminal law in general.
Death penalty Schabas has been very active in the movement for worldwide abolition of capital punishment. His book The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International LawWilliam Schabas, The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law, Cambridge University Press (1993) 3RD.EDITION, 2003. and his other writings on the subject have been referred to in judgments by national and international tribunals, including the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the United States Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Canada and the Supreme Court of the Philippines. Schabas regularly lectures on capital punishment in China and the United States. In 2009 he was a consultant to the United Nations responsible for preparing the Secretary General's five-yearly report on the status of capital punishment. Schabas is the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Academic Network Against the Death Penalty and for a Universal Moratorium on Capital Punishment, and Advisor to the International Centre for Death Penalty Research at Beijing Normal University.
Genocide For Schabas, the definition of what constituted the crime of genocide historically, unlike other laws governing international crimes, did not change for nearly 5 decades after its original formulation, though scholars beyond the legal discipline were critical of narrowness of the definition. Reviewing the evolving legal debate, Schabas notes a tendency to merge the notion of genocide with the related concept of crimes against humanity. In his own view, these should be kept distinct, with the former restricted to the definition originally framed in the Geneva Conventions, while the latter is sufficiently broad to prosecute all other cases of mass murder in ethnic and religious conflicts.William Schabas, "Genocide in International Law: A Discussion with William Schabas," United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 4 March 2004.
Schabas argues that the legal term "genocide" is a loaded one that should not be used to describe every atrocity involving mass killings. He argues that, in the strict legal sense, the only true "genocides" in recent history were the Armenian genocide, the Jewish and Gypsy Holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide. In his book Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2009) he supports the view that Stalin's atrocities in Ukraine, the killings of Slav and Soviet citizens under the Nazi occupation, and the Holodomor were not, legally, genocide. In his book he summarizes the legal opinions regarding the status of the atrocities committed in Bosnia, deeming them ethnic cleansing and not genocide, stating that "Ethnic cleansing is also a warning sign of genocide to come. Genocide is the last resort of the frustrated ethnic cleanser." Schabas also criticises the United Nations General Assembly for recognising ethnic cleansing as genocide.
In March 1993, Schabas co-authored the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Violations in Rwanda.