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THE FORA FOR JUSTICE
An extract from the opening statement of Justice Robert Jackson, then Chief
Prosecutor for the United States, is quite telling:
“The privilege of opening the first trial in the history for crimes against the
peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to
condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, so devastating that
civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their
being repeated.”"
Put simply, the IMT mandate was reduced to retribution and punishment of
Nazi leaders. With the impressive record, the Nuremberg judgment is “the defining
moment in international criminal law.”
Now, in the legal sense, Nuremberg’s legacy was of major significance for doing
justice in the region of the former Yugoslavia. The establishment of ICTY would
have hardly be possible without the Nuremberg precedent: despite some obvious
differences between the IMT and the ICTY, taking into account the legal purposes
of international criminal proceedings, there is no doubt that the ICTY was a
Nuremberg-like tribunal. The ICTY was built on the fundamental principles of
international criminal law set up in Nuremberg: individual criminal responsibility
for committed crimes, no immunity for state representatives, and denial of any
possibility to rely on official position or superior orders as defenses. Nuremberg
Charter also served as a normative basis for the ICTY Statute regarding the
definition of crimes and, in particular, for crimes against humanity, which after
Nuremberg, gained both in clarity and number. The rudiments of fair trial
standards followed in Nuremberg have been accepted, further developed, and
applied in the proceedings run before the ICTY."
Although both the IMT and the ICTY suffered from certain legal imperfections,
one can confidently say that both tribunals successfully served a fundamental legal
purpose of the international criminal proceedings — determination upon proof
of individual criminal responsibility for committed crimes. Generally, the worst
nightmare closely connected to conducting any criminal proceedings is a fear
of punishing an innocent person. Neither of the tribunals, either the IMT or the
1 The Opening Statement is available at https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/
robert-jackson-opening-statement-nuremberg. For more see Telford Taylor, The Anatomy
of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, Boston, MA, Back Bay Book, 1992.
Robert Cryer, Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, in Antonio Cassese (ed.), The
Oxford Companion to International Criminal Justice, Oxford, OUP, 2009, 441-443.
13 For more see, e.g., Gerhard Werle, Principles of International Criminal Law, The Hague,
TMC Asser Press, 2005, 16-17; Vladimir D. Degan - Berislav Pavisic — Violeta Beëirevié,
Medunarodno i transnacionalno krivicno pravo, Beograd, Sluzbeni glasnik & PFUUB, 2011,
165-166.
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