Oldal 59 [59]
OCR
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. « 57 +
