The Colonial Period: Crimes That Do Not Die
The fundamental difference between an ordinary crime and an international crime—whether a war crime, an act of aggression, a crime against humanity, an act of genocide, or torture—lies in their very nature: international crimes are deemed so grave that they concern the international community as a whole. As such, they are not subject to any statute of limitations: they can be prosecuted for as long as their perpetrators are alive, even if the victims have died.
It is this principle that made it possible to try Khmer Rouge leaders more than 40 years after the genocide committed in Cambodia in the 1970s, to convict a former Auschwitz bookkeeper in 2015 at the age of 94, or to continue prosecuting in Europe to this day individuals involved in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In recent years, even older crimes, in which Swiss citizens took part, have resurfaced with renewed intensity: colonial crimes.
A Historic Resolution, Telling Abstentions
On 25 March, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing the transatlantic slave trade of Africans and racial slavery as “the most serious crime against humanity,” not only because of their brutality and duration, but also because of their long-term structural consequences. While the ICC had already classified slavery among crimes against humanity in the Rome Statute adopted in 1998, its jurisdiction to try such crimes applies only to offenses committed from July 2002 onward. This is precisely what gives this resolution its full significance: by applying this characterization to conduct that for the most part dates back to distant eras well before the codification of international criminal law, the General Assembly has taken a considerable symbolic and political step.
Though not formally binding, this resolution calls on member states to engage in “an inclusive and good-faith dialogue on restorative justice,” including official apologies, measures of restitution, compensation and rehabilitation, as well as legislative reforms to combat systemic racism. It garnered 123 votes in favor—nearly all African countries, and numerous states in the Caribbean, South America, Asia, and the Arab world. Fifty states abstained, including the 27 countries of the European Union and Switzerland. Three voted against: the United States, Israel, and Argentina.
Two months later, however, Emmanuel Macron took a significant step. On 21 May, the day marking the 25th anniversary of the Taubira law recognizing the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity, the French president publicly raised the need for reparations—a first for a head of state in France—and announced, jointly with Ghanaian President John Mahama, the creation of an international scientific commission tasked with formulating concrete recommendations for political decision-makers. The French National Assembly also repealed, on 28 May, the Code Noir and all the provisions that had regulated slavery in the French colonies—something that had never been done before.
Swiss Citizens Involved in These Crimes
In Switzerland, many political leaders seem to consider that these crimes concern other countries. Thus Federal Councillor Doris Leuthard declared during an official visit to Ouidah, Benin, in 2017, at the memorial site of the slave trade: “I am glad that Switzerland never took part either in these stories of slavery or in colonization.”
History, however, qualifies this certainty. By way of example, the Neuchâtel natives David de Pury and Alfred Jacques Henri Berthoud were active in these crimes—the former through colonial trade and the slave trade in the 18th century, the latter through slave plantations in Suriname in the 19th century. The Basel native Johann August Sutter founded a colony in California that relied on forced labor in the 19th century. The family of the Zurich-born founder of Credit Suisse, Alfred Escher, owned a slave-operated coffee plantation in Cuba, also in the 19th century. And the Grisons native Hans Christoffel took part, in the early 20th century, in a Dutch military campaign during which nearly 3,000 civilians were killed in Sumatra.
Today it is museums that, in our country, are showing themselves to be the most proactive in confronting this legacy, through provenance research, restitutions, and the decolonization of collections. In March 2026, 28 objects held in Zurich and Geneva museums were thus returned to Nigeria.
A Historic Trial That Will Not Take Place
One might conclude that colonial crimes are now settled solely on the terrain of restitutions, reparations, and memory, the direct perpetrators all having died long ago. Yet very recently it came close to being otherwise.
On 17 March 2026, Etienne Davignon, a Belgian citizen born in 1932, was referred to a criminal court in Brussels for three war crimes linked to the arrest and transfer of Patrice Lumumba to Katanga province, between late 1960 and early 1961. The first prime minister of independent Congo, this figure of African independence still revered on the continent today, was assassinated on 17 January 1961. Mr. Davignon was at the time a young Belgian diplomat posted in Kinshasa. His trial would have constituted an event of considerable historical, political, and symbolic significance: the first individual criminal prosecution of a European for a crime linked to African decolonization.
This trial will not take place. Etienne Davignon died on 18 May 2026, at the age of 93. The alleged Western involvement in the murder of Mr. Lumumba will thus never find judicial resolution, joining other grey areas of the Congolese postcolonial period, such as the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in a September 1961 crash in present-day Zambia, the circumstances of which remain widely debated.
International Crimes: The Ghosts That Haunt the Present
When international crimes never reach the courts, they do not thereby disappear. They often continue, like ghosts, to inhabit the present—fueling resentments, weakening trust between nations, and indefinitely postponing a reconciliation that first requires the truth to be established.
It is our shared responsibility, for ourselves and for future generations, to ensure that the international crimes committed in the 21st century do not meet the same fate.
The article first appeared in French in Le Temps on June 1st, 2026
Image: mauritius images / TopFoto
