#Nuremberg #Beginning #international #criminal #law
On July 29, 1946, General Roman Rudenko , the chief Soviet prosecutor, delivered the summation for the Soviet Union. His speech was four hours long. This short excerpt shows Rudenko’s call for the death penalty for all defendants. “I appeal to the Tribunal to sentence the defendants without exception to the supreme penalty-death. Such a verdict will be greeted with satisfaction by all progressive mankind”.
Produced by US Army Signal Corps 1945-1956, housed in National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Digitized and provided by The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive.
The International Military Tribunal, and its charter, “marked the true beginning of international criminal law”.[2] The trial has met a mixed reception ranging from glorification to condemnation.[262] The reaction was initially predominantly negative, but has become more positive over time.[263]
The selective prosecution exclusively of the defeated Axis and hypocrisy of all four Allied powers has garnered the most persistent criticism. Such actions as the German–Soviet pact[264][265] the expulsion of millions of Germans from central and eastern Europe,[266] and violent suppression of anti-colonial uprisings would have been deemed illegal according to the definitions of international crimes in the Nuremberg charter.[267] Another controversy resulted from trying defendants for acts that were not criminal at the time,[268] particularly crimes against peace.[268][31] Equally novel but less controversial were crimes against humanity, the conspiracy charge, and criminal penalties on individuals for breaches of international law.[269] Besides these criticisms, the trials have been taken to task for the distortion that comes from fitting historical events into legal categories.[270]
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trial) borrowed many of its ideas from the IMT, including all four charges, and was intended by the Truman Administration to shore up the IMT’s legal legacy.[264][271] On 11 December 1946, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution affirming “the principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal”.[272] In 1950, the International Law Commission drafted the Nuremberg principles to codify international criminal law, although the Cold War prevented the adoption of these principles until the 1990s.[273][274] The 1948 Genocide Convention was much more restricted than Lemkin’s original concept and its effectiveness was further limited by Cold War politics.[274][275] In the 1990s, a revival of international criminal law included the establishment of ad hoc international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), which were widely viewed as part of the legacy of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. A permanent International Criminal Court (ICC), proposed in 1953, was established in 2002.[276][277][278]
The trials were the first use of simultaneous interpretation, which stimulated technical advances in translation methods.[279][280] The Palace of Justice houses a museum on the trial and the courtroom became a tourist attraction, drawing 13,138 visitors in 2005.[281] The IMT is one of the most well-studied trials in history, and it has also been the subject of an abundance of books and scholarly publications, along with motion pictures such as Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and The Memory of Justice (1976
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