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Madeleine Albright: In memoriam
Portrait of Madeleine Albright photographed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
The IBA was sad to learn of the death of Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State (1997–2001), who passed on 23 March 2022 in Washington, DC, at the age of 84.
Born in Prague in 1937, Albright’s family emigrated to the US in 1948 following the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s coup d’état.
A leading figure in US and international politics, Albright worked for the US National Security Council and was ambassador to the United Nations from 1993–1997 prior to her appointment by President Bill Clinton as the first female US Secretary of State. She was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the US government at the time of her appointment.
After leaving office, among other roles held, Albright served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations and was Honorary Chair of the World Justice Project.
In the mid-2000s, she co-chaired the Genocide Prevention Task Force created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the United States Institute of Peace. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in May 2012.
Albright was a tireless advocate and protector of human rights. She was instrumental in the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. During the 1990s, she advocated for the creation of an international court to prosecute the most egregious human rights violations, despite the US never having been a state party to the Rome Statute, which formally established the International Criminal Court in 2002.
Madeleine Albright presenting at IBA Annual Conference, Boston, 2013.
Madeleine Albright at the IBA Annual Conference 2013, Boston
In 2013 Albright was the keynote speaker at the IBA Annual Conference’s opening ceremony in Boston. Some key excerpts of her address are reproduced below.
’After 9/11, and in the years since, the threat posed by violent extremist groups has been a subject of urgent global concern, which some perceive in wholly religious terms. But this confrontation is not about beliefs, it’s about behaviour; the law does not care what people think – the law cares what people do. When terrorists fly airplanes into buildings or blow up a subway train or plant explosives in the middle of a crowd during the Boston Marathon, they’re trying to destroy the very idea of law. We cannot let them succeed. Our task collectively is to ensure that the guilty are held accountable, but to do so in a way that upholds the principles upon which the rule of law is rightly based.’
Madeleine Albright and Mark Ellis in discussion at IBA Annual Conference, Boston, 2013.
‘I’ve lived through a pretty turbulent time in my life, but I am a child that has not only lived through World War II but also in the post-World War II period, where, in fact, there was the creation of a lot of institutions, which were supposed to deal with the turbulence – obviously the United Nations [UN] and a variety of regional organisations.
What troubles me at the moment is that there is a real question as to whether the organisations work, whether they are properly suited for the 21st century. And the reason that I say that is that they are based on the concept of the nation state, which is something that we all grew up with. There is something new in the world today, which is non-state actors. And non-state actors are not just the terrorists.
Non-state actors are also businesses and non-governmental organisations, and a variety of different stakeholders. And the non-state actors are never at the table, and I think we haven’t quite figured out how to adjust the institutional structure to make it work.’
I thought that [the International Criminal Court] was kind of a natural outgrowth of the war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda […] I regretted that we were not able to be a part of it early on. And part of it has to do with the fact that the United States had many responsibilities abroad, primarily with our military.
What has been missed in this whole story is that it is possible if you’ve got a functional legal system of your own, not to submit things to the International Criminal Court; I do think on the whole we have a functioning legal system. So, I think there has been more recognition of the fact that the ICC is moving along; the Bush administration did in fact think it had a role.’