The Sir Elihu Lauterpacht International Law Lecture 2018: The development of humanity as a constraint on the conduct of war

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as the traditional owners and custodiansof the land on which we meet. I pay my respects to their elders, past, presentand emerging. I deeply respect and admire the ability of the Ngunnawal, andof many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, to have survived invasion and violent dispossession of their land and to have maintainedthe richness of their cultural, linguistic, legal and spiritual traditions. On thesubject matter of my lecture, humanity as a constraint on the conduct of war, Iacknowledge that many of our Aboriginal peoples were extended little, if any,humanity in the colonial violence to which they were subjected. This is certainly true of the frontier wars in my own State of Tasmania (Van Diemen’sLand) in the 1820s and 1830s which resulted in the near annihilation of Aboriginality in the colony. Social Darwinism influenced the justificatory view that the Aboriginal people of Van Diemen’s Land were not only an obstacle to thesettlement enterprise but that in their ‘savage’ state they were sub-human anddoomed to extinction