The Lieber Code of 1863, the Union Army and President Abraham Lincoln’s laudable, if admittedly naïve, attempt to limit the ravages of the American Civil War, precipitated a paradigm shift away from the mere moral condemnation of the destruction and appropriation of cultural property toward express legal proscription. Article 35 of the code is unambiguous: “Classical works of art, libraries, scientific collections, or precious instruments . . . must be secured against all avoidable injury, even when they are contained in fortified places whilst besieged or bombarded.” The prescriptive, deterrent objective of the code is reflected in Article 44, which makes clear that the intent was not only to prohibit such conduct, but to actively ascribe a penal basis for individual responsibility.2

Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi

Nuremberg and then later at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

prehistory of individual criminal responsibility for heritage destruction as an international crime, looking at the oft-neglected efforts undertaken in the aftermath of World War I and World War II

securing individual criminal accountability for the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, whether inside or outside the context of armed conflict