A few weeks back, both The New York Times and The Guardian featured a story about the judicious intervention made by Neil Neches to ensure that a placard on the New York subway - about not littering the carriages with abandoned newspapers - was punctuated with a semicolon rather than a comma, so that the two clauses of the request it carried were separated as follows:
Please put it in a trash can; that's good news for everyone.The New York Times characterized the semicolon as effecting...
... that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.The Guardian approved Mr Neches's intervention, quoting Fowler's view that the semicolon should be used to indicate...
... a discontinuity of grammatical construction greater than that indicated by a comma but less than that indicated by a full stop.All very much to the point. I, too, am with Neil Neches. But the story reminds me of how the choice between semicolon and comma has mattered more than as a merely stylistic preference. It reminds me of a punctuational intervention of an opposite kind that was once of some considerable importance in the sphere of international law.
Article 6 (c) of the Nuremberg Charter, signed by the Allied Powers in August 1945, defined the offence of crimes against humanity in these terms:
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.Initially, the English and French versions of this paragraph had a semicolon after the word 'war', where the Russian version had a comma. By means of a special protocol to the original document, this was changed to bring the English and French versions into line with the Russian one. The point of the change was to make clear that the phrase 'in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal' should be taken as modifying not only 'persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds', but also the acts enumerated before the piece of punctuation in question. The effect of the change was to reinforce a linkage that would be upheld by the Nuremberg Tribunal between crimes against humanity and war; or, what amounts to the same thing, between crimes against humanity and the other two offences within the Tribunal's jurisdiction, namely crimes against peace and war crimes. Crimes against humanity were not to be construed, in other words, as an altogether free-standing and independent offence.
In the interpretation of the concept of crimes against humanity, this came to be known as the 'war nexus' and was controversial from the very beginning, because of its effect of limiting the application of that concept to circumstances of inter-state military conflict. There is no good reason why the most egregious forms of violence against people should not be treated as an international crime where they are perpetrated in circumstances of civil conflict or political repression rather than of war between states. In fact, this view is now the authoritative one. Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the ICC omits any reference to the context of war.