The Beginning of a Beautiful Courtship

This occasional series will look at different forms of international justice and how they shape our ability to heal and re-build post-atrocity societies.

International justice is a fairly recent concept. From the birth of nation-states until the early part of the twentieth century, state sovereignty was sacrosanct. Governments were free, for the most part, to take any action they saw fit against the citizens of their own states. Only two areas of international law addressed violations of individual rights by states-laws of state responsibility for injury to aliens and the laws and customs of war. However, both of these areas were restricted to the actions that one government took against citizens of other states. If a foreign government was attempting to kill you in your own country you could count on some kind of protection. Not so if your own government had similar plans in mind.

It was not until the end of World War Two that governments were held accountable for actions against their own citizenry. Once hostilities ceased the Allied Powers began preparations for trials of high-ranking citizens of the Axis powers.  The International Military Tribunal (better known as the Nuremberg Trial) and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (better known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial) eventually tried fifty-two men, sentencing many of them to death or life imprisonment.

The establishment of the IMT was a watershed moment in international criminal law. It was in the aftermath of the IMT that a government's treatment of its citizens in peacetime became fair game for general international regulation.  One needs to look only as far as drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights treaties as evidence of this development. Another radical consequence of the IMT was the further elaboration of international law on individual criminal responsibility for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. Unfortunately, nothing came of these developments for another forty years.

If international justice is one big happy family then the cousins of the IMT were born in the early 1990s. Known as the ad hoc tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) were the result of great atrocities. A decade later, the true heir of the IMT, the International Criminal Court (ICC), was finally given life.

After nearly six decades the world had finally put governments on notice-crimes against your own citizens would not go unpunished. But how successful have the ICTY, ICTR, and ICC been?  Next time we will look at some of the many flaws of these three courts and the attempts to address those problems.

[Photo of the defendants in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials.]