Oldal 45 [45]
THE BANALITY OF GOOD
— THE ICC REPORT OF EXPERTS AND THE STUDY
OF INTERNATIONAL COURTS
——o—
MARJAN AJEVSKI*
“That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreck more
havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in
man — that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”?
With these words, Arendt summarised was so off-putting to her by Eichmann’s
self-depiction: “He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by
no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the
greatest criminals of that period.”? He was “banal”, ordinary, and in his words,
a cog in a giant bureaucratic death machine that could easily be replaced by any
other Nazi without a stutter in the machine.
Of course, Eichmann was evil, as the countless written and other accounts of his
time as an SS officer show.’ Arendt’s image of Eichmann was very much influenced
by her thoughts on Totalitarianism,*® and what she saw as the transformation of
thinking human beings into the willing executioners of their superiors’ orders.
However, the picture that Arendt portrayed of Eichmann as someone banal and
ordinary is still alive today.
Sixty years later, we have another account of a bureaucracy,® but this one
dedicated to investigating and punishing contemporary Eichmanns. It is a
' Research Fellow in Law, Open University Law School, Ihe Open University, UK.
I wish to thank the editors for their invitation to contribute to Karoly’s Liber Amicorum.
As this piece shows, the books that he got me to read, like Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem,
Damaska’s The Faces of Justice and State Authority, and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish
have stayed with me throughout my academic life and I still draw inspiration from them.
Thank you, Professor Bard Karoly, for your influence.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York,
Penguin, 2006, Postscript.
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Antonio Cassese, Eichmann: Is Evil So Banal?, Journal of International Criminal Justice 7
(2009), 645-652.
5 Cassesse, Is Evil so Banal?, 646.
Independent Expert Review of the International Criminal Court and the Rome Statute
System, Final Report, (hereafter the Report) 30 September 2020, https://asp.icc-cpi.int/
iccdocs/asp_docs/ASP19/IER-Final-Report-ENG.pdf.
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