How Polish Thinkers Helped Shape Human Rights Law

pomnik_tadeusza_kosciuszki_na_placu_wolnosci_w_lodzi_fot_robert_neumann_forum_forum-0564434962-s_1.jpeg, full-width, Monument to Tadeusz Kosciuszko at Liberty Square in Lódź, photo: Robert Neumann / Forum

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From founding UNICEF, one of the world’s most famous humanitarian aid organisations, to drafting an international convention that would criminalise genocide or fighting successfully for the rights of children, peasants and repressed ethnic minorities, Polish activists have made significant contributions to global human rights.

This article will confine itself to a focus on the key human-rights pioneers in the period from the 18th century to the end of the Second World War. The number of individuals who contributed to the struggle for human rights in Poland during the communist era and the period of Solidarity is very large and examined elsewhere. Also, the subject of the pioneers of Polish women’s rights is already the subject of a separate extensive article on Culture.pl by Patryk Zakrzewski.

Saying No to Children, Kitchen, Church: The Pioneers of Women’s Rights in Poland

Tadeusz Kościuszko – a champion of the world’s minorities

Tadeusz Kościuszko as painted by Karl Gottlieb Schweikart. Kościuszko is shown wearing the Eagle of the Society of Cincinnati awarded to him by General Washington, photo: www.wilanow-palac.art.pl

If we take the 18th century as a starting point, Tadeusz Kościuszko is the first Polish name worthy of being called a human-rights pioneer.

Kościuszko’s legacy is acknowledged internationally, with prominent monuments and sites in his honour across the world, from Kraków’s Kościuszko Mound; to Australia’s highest mountain, Mount Kościuszko; or the Kościuszko Bridge in New York. This freedom-fighting hero was a military leader, a statesman and an engineer and fought for both Polish and American national freedom at the end of the 18th century. His contribution to the furthering of human rights included, in particular, his often-forgotten defence of the rights of ethnic minorities and peasants.

His sympathy for the concept of equal rights and freedoms for all people led Kosciuszko to join the American Revolutionary War in 1776 and to support the American struggle for human rights and independence. Over the next eight years, which he spent serving as an officer in the American Army, Kościuszko cemented his place among the founding fathers of America through significant actions, such as devising the plan for the victorious Battle of Saratoga, which became a pivotal moment in the American Revolution.

During his time spent in America, Kościuszko demonstrated his progressive approach towards minority ethnic groups in several ways, which demonstrated that he was ahead of his time. For example, his aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War was Agrippa Hull, an African American man whom Kościuszko held in very high regard, something which was seen as unusual at a time when African Americans were almost universally seen and treated as slaves.

But this relationship was just one sign of Kościuszko’s deep concern for the human rights of African American slaves, which, remarkably, he advocated for through his will. During his second stay in America in 1798, Kościuszko made his friend Thomas Jefferson, the then vice-president and future president of the United States, the executor of his will and asked that the proceeds from the American estate which he had been given by Congress for his contributions in the American Revolutionary War be spent on freeing and educating African American slaves:

I Tadeusz Kosciuszko […] hereby authorise my friend Thomas Jefferson to employ the whole [of my US property] in purchasing Negroes from among his own or any others and giving them Liberty in my name, in giving them an education […] and in having them instructed […] in their duties as citizens […] to be defenders of their Liberty and Country.

Monument to Casimir Pulaski, Washington, DC, photo: Wikipedia.

It was an extraordinary request. At the time, Jefferson, who was the author of the words ‘All men are created equal’, had around 100 slaves, and Kościuszko’s will offered him the opportunity to free them. But Kościuszko’s request was too progressive for his time, and Jefferson never fulfilled it. Though he seemed to support the belief that slavery was morally wrong, Jefferson considered it a less important issue than the law of ownership and the constitutional right of every state. It would also have put him in a difficult position with members of his own class of Virginia plantation owners.

Kościuszko’s will was subsequently widely commented upon in the American press and particularly papers aimed at African Americans, presenting Kościuszko alongside Abraham Lincoln as a hero in the fight for racial equality. Some abolition activists even went so far as to comment that Kościuszko’s will was a great missed opportunity of American history.

It was not only the rights and freedoms of African Americans that Kościuszko supported but also those of other ethnic minorities. For example, a documented meeting between Kosciuszko and a native American tribal leader shows Kosciuszko’s sympathies for this group. When Kosciuszko met in Philadelphia with Chief Little Turtle of the Miami Indian Tribe, the tribal leader gave Kościuszko a tomahawk and peace pipe as a sign of respect and appreciation, while Kosciuszko gave him two pistols with the message to ‘shoot dead the first man who comes to subjugate you’. When he returned to Poland from America, Kościuszko was also vocal in championing the rights of the serfs and fought in defence of the Polish Constitution of 3 May 1791, the first democratic constitution in Europe and the first to address the rights of peasants.

From a young age, when he would play with the children of the peasant families working on his family’s estate, Kościuszko developed a particular sympathy and respect for Polish peasants, who were kept in a state of semi-enslavement, had very few rights and were often overworked. Kościuszko struck up a close relationship with Poland’s political reformers and argued that peasants and Jews should be afforded full citizenship rights in order to motivate them to defend Poland in the event of war. Though some rights were offered to these groups in the Constitution of 3 May 1791, which Kościuszko saw as a step in the right direction, he was disappointed that they didn’t go far enough in improving the situation of the most underprivileged.

Nonetheless, Kościuszko also took initiatives on his own estates to improve the situation of the peasants. In 1792, he gave his part of his family estate in Siechnowicze (currently Sekhnovichi in Belarus) to his sister Anna under the condition that the peasants would only have to work for the estate two days per week and women peasants would be exempted from the requirement to work entirely. In a letter to his sister, he explained that he would have set the peasants free if he could have guaranteed that the government would ensure the conditions of his will, but he did the best he could under the circumstances in Poland at the time: ‘But in this country, one needs to do what one can safely do in order to ease humanity and remember that in nature we are all equal, the only difference being virtue, wealth and information’.

Alicja Margolis on a mural in Warsaw, photo: Wikipedia.

In 1794, Kościuszko would go even further in championing the rights of peasants when he engaged them and other underprivileged groups in the cause of freedom during what is now called the Kościuszko Uprising against the Russian Empire, in which he personally led a group of peasant scythemen volunteers to victory at Racławice.

In an insurrection modelled on the American Revolutionary War in which slaves had joined the war against their masters, Kościuszko firmly believed that, in order for his insurrection to be successful, groups formerly overlooked in the creation of Polish national identity would have to be engaged. As such, not only did Kościuszko engage peasants but also Jews, who formed the so-called Bearded Cavalry under Berek Joselewicz, the first exclusively Jewish military unit since ancient times.

During the Uprising, Kościuszko also issued a major political declaration, called the Proclamation of Połaniec (Uniwersał Połaniecki, 7 May 1794), which stated that serfs were entitled to civil rights, granted them limited personal freedom, reduced their work obligations, guaranteed ownership of the land cultivated by them and gave them the right to state assistance against the abuses of the Polish nobility. The points written in the proclamation were certainly pioneering for their time, but they were unfortunately never enacted due to the ultimate failure of the Kościuszko Uprising and the third partition of Poland, which erased the country from the map of Europe in 1795.

A final noble gesture towards peasants’ rights was made by Kościuszko through his will, read in 1817, the year of his death, in which he stipulated that all the serfs in his family’s village of Siechnowicze be freed after his death. Unfortunately, this action was not approved by Tsar Aleksander I of the Russian Empire, under whose partition the village of Siechnowicze was located at that time.

Although Kościuszko’s support of human rights may not have succeeded in being implemented during his lifetime, it was certainly pioneering and was discussed publicly and supported by many other reformers. In hindsight, it can be seen as a precursor of later human-rights breakthroughs.

Ludwik Rajchman – the journey to UNICEF

Hercsh Lauterpacht, photo: The Lauterpach Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge

Ludwik Rajchman, although little known today, was the founder of UNICEF, one of the world’s most universally recognised humanitarian aid organisations for children.

A bacteriologist, doctor and social activist, Rajchman was born into a Polish family of Jewish background in 1881. His father was the founder of the Warsaw Philharmonic and the first director of the National Philharmonic, while his mother was a publicist and social activist for women’s rights.

After completing his studies in medicine at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Rajchman finished a course in bacteriology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and went on to study epidemiology in London in 1910. He stayed in London until Poland regained its independence in 1918.

After his return to Poland, Rajchman set up the Warsaw Central Institute of Hygiene, which in 1923 became the National Institute of Hygiene, with Rajchman as its first director. His work in London led to his becoming a recognised bacteriologist, and he began working internationally. In 1921, he became the manager of the hygiene section at the League of Nations and from 1939 the director of its Health Organisation. He conducted studies during this time on controlling infectious diseases and epidemics, standardising food regulations and protecting children and people with disabilities.

Rajchman travelled widely. He visited China for the first time in 1930 and even set up a Hygiene Institute similar to the one he had set up a few years earlier in Warsaw. The institutions created and directed by Rajchman were some of the first organised attempts at international protection of health.

During WWII, Rajchman visited the United States and tried to draw attention to the Nazi-German exterminations taking place on Polish territory. He was also able to secure food and medical aid for Poland. After the end of the war, he was part of the Polish delegation at the Potsdam Conference. Thanks to him, Poland became a beneficiary of the international United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), with Rajchman as one of its founders. Thanks to its support, Poland was able to receive a substantial amount of medical equipment making possible the study and production of antibiotics. It was perhaps Rajchman’s defence of children’s rights through UNICEF that was most significant in placing him among the pioneers of Polish human-rights activists.

With the formation of the United Nations after WWII, Rajchman lobbied diplomats to establish an international foundation for the protection of children. He got his wish on 11 December 1946, when the General Assembly of the United Nations ratified the establishment of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, UNICEF, whose aim was to help children in the areas of nutrition, health protection and education.

Marek Edelman, photo: CAF/Wojtek Łaski/East News

Rajchman became the director of the newly formed organisation and remained a chairman of the board until 1950, refusing to be paid for his work. A monumentally successful project, UNICEF continued to grow quickly and expand to include more and more countries in its work. By 1953, it had become a permanent agency of the United Nations, and the organisation was honoured in 1965 with one of the world’s most recognised accolades, the Nobel Peace Prize. Today, UNICEF works in over 190 countries and helps save around 7 million children each year.

Janusz Korczak – children’s rights are equal to adults’ rights

Janusz Korczak, 1933, photo: Polon National Library

A Polish-Jewish teacher, doctor, author and the first and most radical children’s rights campaigner, Janusz Korczak, whose real name was Henryk Goldszmit, was born in Warsaw in 1878/79 and is best known as the director of a Warsaw orphanage. In 1942 he chose to accompany the 192 children and staff of the orphanage who were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp by the Germans, and he perished alongside them.

But aside from this act of selfless bravery, Korczak was a man whose ideas about children’s rights were pioneering in their time. He was above all an indefatigable advocate that children’s rights should be recognised as being of equal importance as the rights of adults, as was summed up in his famous line: ‘There are no children… there are people’.

When the League of Nations released the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924, Korczak was disappointed with it, arguing that it didn’t go far enough because it didn’t insist on children’s rights – it was only advisory. For Korczak, the two most important children’s rights were the right to receive love and the right to respect, and he elaborated on both in books he wrote for parents and teachers: How to Love a Child and The Child’s Right to Respect.

So influential were Korczak’s ideas that sometime later they would have a direct influence on the International Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the United Nations in 1989. They would also serve as inspiration for many other international institutions such as the Council of Europe and UNESCO, which declared 1978–79 to be the Year of Janusz Korczak to coincide with the centenary of his birth and the UN Year of the Child.

Raphael Lemkin – author of the Genocide Convention

Rafał Lemkin, photo: Center for Jewish History

Another Pole who deserves a place on the list of human-rights pioneers is Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael (Rafał) Lemkin for his work on the recognition of the concept of genocide and its entrenchment in international law.

Born in 1900 in Bezwodne in the Russian Empire (Bezvodno in today’s Belarus), Lemkin graduated with a doctorate in law from what was then Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów (now University of Lviv in Ukraine), one of the best legal departments in Poland. He was supervised by Professor Juliusz Makarewicz, one of the best criminal law professionals of the day.

After completing his studies, he travelled around Europe and took part in conferences dedicated to the unification of penal law. It was at one of these conferences, in Madrid in 1933, that Lemkin presented a paper which alluded to Polish humanitarian law and the thoughts of Paweł Włodkowic from 1414, who had spoken against the massacres of pagan groups by the Crusaders on the basis that the pagan groups had a right to their own culture and beliefs.

In his paper, Lemkin outlined five types of crimes, the two most important of which he called ‘barbarism’ and ‘vandalism’. ‘Barbarism’ was the term he used for destructive actions aimed at the members of a specific faith community, nationality or race, while ‘vandalism’ was what he termed the destruction of works of art, cultural goods and places of religious worship. The paper was a response to the politics of repression against the Jewish community by Nazi Germany. In his paper, Lemkin called on the League of Nations to ratify a convention on the punishment of crimes against humanity. His arguments were topical as the Hague Convention written at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries had done nothing to prevent numerous war crimes during WWI or to prevent Turkey’s crimes against the Armenians or Stalin’s purges, while the Great Hunger in Ukraine had led to the loss of millions of lives in the Soviet Union. But the political will did not yet exist for a convention on crimes against humanity.

In the second half of the 1930s, Lemkin opened his own legal practice in Warsaw, but in September 1939, as the Second World War was beginning, Lemkin left Poland through Lithuania to Sweden and later, in 1941, to the United States. He began as a lecturer in law at the University of North Carolina and started working as a legal advisor to various US government institutions, including the Department of War, as he observed the barbaric politics of Nazi Germany on the territory of occupied Europe. Lemkin lost 40 family members through Nazi exterminations, including both of his parents. It was at this time that he wrote his most important work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in 1944, in which he first coined the term ‘genocide’.

The term is a combination of the Greek word for race, ‘genos’ and the Latin for killing, ‘-cidium’, and Lemkin conceived of its meaning in very broad terms, not only as the physical subjugation of national, ethnic, religious or political groups but also the destruction of their culture, language and places of worship and even the promotion of alcoholism and gambling.

Genocide as a term was first used more widely in the trials of war criminals during the international military tribunals known as the Nuremberg Trials after WWII. Lemkin took part in the trials as an advisor to Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court Robert H. Jackson. The Nazi criminals were tried for crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes against peace, but ‘genocide’ was used many times in indictment acts in line with the definition first put forward by Lemkin. Lemkin felt it better communicated the true nature of crimes committed by the Germans. Interestingly, ‘genocide’ was also used by a Soviet lawyer to describe the Katyń Massacre of which the Soviet Union falsely accused Germany at the Nuremberg Trials (it later turned out to have been a crime committed by the Soviets).

In December 1946, the General Assembly of the UN accepted a resolution recognising genocide as a crime in the eyes of international law. Lemkin, however, wanted not only to punish those who had engaged in the crime of genocide in the past but also to prevent it from happening in the future. For the next two years, therefore, abandoning all other work, he spent time lobbying UN diplomats to create an international convention on genocide, an issue constantly resisted by the Soviet Union, which didn’t want to accept genocide carried out for political reasons and because of Stalin’s fears that he could be tried for purges conducted in the past.

Lemkin nonetheless succeeded in getting an international convention ratified, when in December 1948 the General Assembly of the UN unanimously approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG).

Monument to Janusz Korczak in front of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, photo: Krzysztof Żuczkowski / Forum

After the announcement of the decision, Lemkin reportedly began to cry in the corridor of the UN building, saying, ‘The Convention has to become a powerful tool of the international community’. He also almost instantly set about lobbying for the quick entry into force of the Convention, which occurred in 1951.

Between 1953 and 1957, Lemkin worked with several world governments including Egypt and the Arab delegation to the UN. He also publicly applied the label of genocide to the Ukrainian Holodomor during a speech he delivered in New York.

The Genocide Convention was not adopted by the United States during Lemkin’s lifetime, and as a result he felt that his efforts had failed, even though he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize seven times between 1950 and 1959 (10 times overall) and received a number of other awards.

The Genocide Convention was not adopted by the United States until 1988, and the first prosecutions under the convention were made in the 1990s in response to crimes committed in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Today over 150 countries have signed the convention.

_Sources:

_Culture.pl

_{klubjagiellonski.pl}

_{Janusz Korczak, The Child’s Right to Respect; Janusz Korczak’s Legacy: Lectures on Today’s Challenges for Children, Council of Europe, 2009}

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