This event will take place on Wednesday, March 25, 2026, at 12:30 p.m., both via Zoom and in person in the Slowinski Courtroom at The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law. It is the third of three workshops preceding a two-day international conference, International Criminal Law Eighty Years Later: The Crossroads of Law, Ethics, Religion and International Law, to be held at The Catholic University of America on April 12 and 13, 2027. The three workshops provide students and faculty with the opportunity to discuss a wide range of interdisciplinary issues related to current challenges to international law, including the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as American military intervention in Venezuela and Iran.

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Around 1930, Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned by the fascist dictator Mussolini, wrote in his Prison Notebooks that “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Gramsci saw a dangerous vacuum as the old political order was collapsing, but a new one had not yet emerged. This interregnum created the opportunity for monsters to arise and gain power.

Nearly 100 years after Gramsci, there are signs of a similar period of instability in the international world order. We are witnessing a legitimacy crisis for the vision set out in the Nuremberg Principles: the assumption that the global community would work together to promote principles of cooperation, humanity, and peace. The United States, which played a central role in creating this “new world order” after World War II ended in 1945, now appears to be turning its back on it, viewing it as outdated and counterproductive to American national interests. Other powerful states, including Russia and China, are actively challenging the “new world order,” engaging in overt aggression, refusing to cooperate with international criminal tribunals, and criticizing the rules-based order and Western democratic values as illegitimate and arbitrary. Challenges to the “new world order” are not limited to powerful states; many others, such as Canada, see the postwar US-led international order as fundamentally broken and advocate that “middle powers” build new partnerships to protect their interests.

Are there reasons to believe in justice and accountability in a world that is changing in so many ways, such as rapid technological development and military conflict that is triggering humanitarian catastrophe, including civilian injury and death, mass displacement, hunger, health system collapse, supply chain disruption, and the destruction of infrastructure and cultural heritage? Can the moral principles and values embodied in the Nuremberg Principles play a continuing role in preventing the rise of dangerous monsters like those Antonio Gramsci feared?

Kiran Mohandes Menon, Senior Officer at the International Nuremberg Principles Academy in Nuremberg, Germany, will speak about the legacy of the Nuremberg Principles in light of current international military conflicts, including those in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Rev. Yuriy Shchurko, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology at the Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv, Ukraine, will discuss the intersection of faith and reason within the international order established after 1945. He will explore the relationship between theological and legal thought regarding humanity's legal conscience and the rule of law.

Herbert Reginbogin, Collegiate Fellow of Law at the Institute for Policy Research, The Catholic University of America, and Professor of International Relations at Istanbul Kent University, will discuss the challenge of restoring the “new world order” in a manner consistent with the Nuremberg Principles and the implications for international criminal law.

 

Past Workshops