It's such an honour to be here and to the Lord Mayor and Vice President Lu Gring and

dear Marcus, thank you so very much for the joy of us being brought together and for the

privilege of the conversations that we're about to have. I just have to confess to some

anxiety. Last night, what should have been a brief trip, took much longer and in the

course of that trip, I lost my luggage. I shouldn't look like this, but that's plastic

surgery. But I shouldn't look like this in terms of clothing. So you can understand why

I felt some anxiety when people were invited to go out and smell the city and the university.

Perhaps caution when smelling the speakers. I have washed. But truly, it is such a joy

to be here and I'm so deeply appreciative of the topic that has been set for us. But

I want to assure you that I bring you the warmest greetings too of the High Commissioner

for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, who I believe joins us in this daily struggle in

the contest for rights. It's her task and that of her office to defend human rights,

of course, in the midst of tough political times on the floor of the United Nations,

with state representatives in the media, but most critically in solidarity with human rights

defenders the world over. And it's the mounting pressure on human rights defenders that is

hard evidence that human rights are indeed under contest. Contested everywhere that poverty

in the daily lives of women, children and men is the result of policy choices. Contested

everywhere that conflict and violence are the result of policy decisions. Everywhere

that persecution of people for who they are, for what they believe in, for whom they love

is the result of intentional state action and inaction. Human rights norms standards

are indeed contested. Do you know they're contested in our private meetings with member

states? They are contested in Security Council debates. They are resisted on the floor of

the General Assembly. At this year's Commission on the Status of Women, there were member

states who went line by line by line through every resolution seeking to remove language

and therefore standards pertaining to gender and to gender equality. 2019. You know, as

the conference paper so wisely points out, none of this is that new to Nuremberg. Nuremberg

knows only too well just how tough it is, but how essential that the journey from the

abuse of law to enable ultimately absolute annihilation of in this instance millions

to the use of law, not the abuse, for resolute accountability, a contest that was celebrated

on parade grounds just a few steps from where we meet today, that that journey, the journey

from annihilation to groundbreaking accountability such as that through the was established by

way of the Nuremberg Trials, that this is an ongoing and essential labour. You know,

the trials themselves, the Nuremberg Trials, was at times a deeply frustrating labour,

but it gave birth to the very inspiration, the moral imperative and purpose for the creation

of the United Nations itself and for the modern structure and architecture of international

criminal law, international human rights law in support of international humanitarian law

for benefit of international refugee law and international labour law and international

migration law as we know it today. Right here, the precursor, the antecedents. You know,

at the time there were, as you are no doubt very aware, very sharp disagreements about

even the idea of trials as having an essential part to play in justice in the face of the

cataclysmic violence of the Nazi era. And of course, Victor's justice meant then, as

it often means today, that impartial examination of fault on all sides was absent. But for

all that, it is the Nuremberg Trials and the principles distilled from them, that gave

us the basis for that which we know now today as the Rome Statute for the International

Criminal Court, that prompted the Security Council to establish ad hoc tribunals in the

face of unconscionable slaughter in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, to give backing

for a special court for Sierra Leone and to endorse the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia.

Now, each of those mechanisms, we should recall, were themselves contested. Contested for alleged

partiality, one-sidedness, for excessive length and for their cost, for sometimes very problematic

jurisprudence, for distance and inaccessibility to victims and affected communities, and for