Summary
THE RHETORIC was soaring, the goals were grand, the ideals were large. And yet, by the standards of modern human rights and international law, the International Military Tribunal that tried and sentenced the Nazi leadership in Nuremberg should have been a failure.
From the start, the trials were clearly "victor's justice." Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union created the court with no real German or other "international" involvement. They called their ground rules a charter, not a law, to duck the question of the court's dubious legality. The list of defendants, limited to 20, was hardly comprehensive. At one point, Soviet prosecutors accused the Nazis of massacring some 20,000 Polish officers in 1940, a crime their government knew perfectly well the Soviet Union itself had carried out.See the full content of this document
Extract
Justice From Nuremberg to Baghdad
Yet Nuremberg was, in retrospect, a huge success, and as the trial of Saddam Hussein nears center stage, it is worth remembering why. If it achieved nothing else, Nuremberg laid out for the German people, and fo...
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