GROOME CONTRIBUTES CHAPTER ON THE 1904 GENOCIDE OF THE NAMA AND HERERO PEOPLES OF PRESENT-DAY NAMIBIA
March 2023 — T.M.C. Asser Press, a division of Spring Books, recently published Contemporary International Criminal Law Issues — Contributions in Pursuit of Accountability for Africa and the World. Professor Dermot Groome contributed a chapter which considers the atrocity crimes committed against the Herero and Nama peoples of Southern Africa (modern-day Namibia) between 1904 and 1907 by German colonial forces.
Since the adoption of the Genocide Conventions in 1948, a comprehensive corpus of law has developed through cases brought before international courts. In this chapter, Professor Groome surveys this body of law and applies it to the systematic annihilation of two ethnic populations (the Nama and the Herero peoples) by the German military during its colonialization of southern Africa.
In May 2021, the German government recognized that the widespread and systematic murder of the Herero and Nama peoples by its forces constituted the crime of genocide.
The last major genocide case to be brought before an international court was Groome’s prosecution of General Ratko Mladic.
The book is available from Spring Books.
Professor Dermot Groome is a Professor of Law and the Harvey A. Feldman Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Penn State Dickinson Law. Much of his teaching, scholarship, and service focus on emerging areas of human rights and international criminal law and draw upon his deep expertise and experiences. After starting his career in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office where he was a member of the Sex Crimes Unit and after working in Jamaica, W.I. on issues of community development, human rights, and children’s rights, Professor Groome worked in Cambodia. While in Cambodia, he served as a Legal Advisor to the International Human Rights Law Group, helped lead an investigation into a 1997 attack on peaceful protestors and drafted a report for the UN Security Council, helped the Cambodia Defender’s Project and Legal Aid of Cambodia investigate deaths in police custody, worked on issues related to the incarceration of children, and wrote a draft juvenile criminal procedure code. Professor Groome subsequently spent over 11 years as a senior war crimes prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He investigated and drafted the first genocide indictment against a sitting head of state, Slobodan Milošević, and was the Senior Trial Attorney for the Bosnia indictment. In total, Groome led the prosecution of five international criminal trials including the case against Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of genocide for the murder of over 7,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. He led eight large complex international investigations of senior military, political, and police officials. Groome’s cases all included crimes of sexual violence against women, men, and children. He was instrumental in the development of Joint Criminal Enterprise, a theory of criminal responsibility often used to assess the culpability of senior officials for the crimes committed by their subordinates. Two documentaries have been made about Professor Groome’s cases: The Trial of Ratko Mladić (PBS/Frontline 2019) and Crimes Before the ICTY: Višegrad (UN TV 2017).