The legacy of the trials

The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials paved the way for a number of international conventions and other mechanisms to bring war criminals to book. These include:

• the Genocide Convention (1948)
• the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)

• the Convention on the Abolition of the Statute of Limitations on War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity (1968)
• the Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War (1949) and its supplementary protocols (1977)

• the International Criminal Court in The Hague (2002), established by the Rome Statute (1998).

Although 190 countries – almost all the nations in the world – have signed up to the Geneva Conventions, only 100 have ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Those who have not include China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United States – some of which have themselves been accused of serious breaches of international humanitarian law.

The hope that all this legislation would bring an end to mass murder and abuses of human rights in wartime has not been fulfilled. Indeed, the law has been undermined by atrocities carried out with impunity by the very countries that had dispensed justice at Nuremberg – for example, the British in Kenya and Malaysia, the French in Algeria, and the US in Vietnam and Cambodia – or by dictators they had propped up, such as Augusto Pinochet and, until recently, Saddam Hussein.

American political activist Professor Noam Chomsky has argued that 'if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.'

Successes

International Criminal Court, The Hague in the Netherlands.
ICC-CPI/Wim Van Cappellen

In some instances, however, justice has been done. For example the International Criminal Tribunal of the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted some minor players in the 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo from 1991 to 1999. However, its biggest catch – Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Serbia – died of heart failure during his trial, and overall, the tribunal has failed to impose justice on those who planned and ordered the massacres and mass expulsions.

In Rwanda in 1994, some 937,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were slaughtered by extremist Hutu militias in the space of 100 days. The International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICTR), too, has tried and convicted many people – 28 as of June 2006, with a further 27 undergoing trial and more than 30 others awaiting trial or yet to be found – and the ICTR's grim work is scheduled to continue until at least 2010. However, accusations of Western complicity (particularly France) and a failure to intervene (especially the UN and US) in the genocide have been difficult to address directly.

Restorative justice

Laws that deal with abuses of human rights need to fulfil several purposes. They have to punish the perpetrators, restore dignity to the victims and, if possible, enable the damage to be repaired. But judging by what has not been achieved in the 60-plus years since the Nuremberg trials, it seems that conventional legal mechanisms cannot realise all these aims.

There are, however, some relatively recent examples of restorative, rather than retributive, justice that may prove more effective than conventional war crimes trials. One is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in 1995 to ensure that the terrible crimes of apartheid were publicly acknowledged by the perpetrators who were not punished. In many cases, the full details of the crimes they committed would never have come to light but for their immunity from prosecution.

While the commission has not been welcomed by everyone who suffered under the previous white supremacist regime, these sorts of revelations have enabled many victims to feel vindicated and supported. This, in turn, has given them the psychological and political strength to forge a future for themselves that is not tainted by their previous experiences.

Terrible crimes cannot be undone. A crucial aim of international law and the organisations that support it must be to enable survivors to come to terms with their history so that it does not continue to poison their lives and the lives of future generations.

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