Malcontent- Facing the Past. Amending Historical Injustices through Instruments of Transitional Justice

Question 1

Malcontent calls the Nuremberg Tribunal an example of ‘double standards’ and ‘victor’s justice’. What does he mean by that?

Answer 1

Convicted the Germans for doing what the Europeans and US did- The French were violating the Geneva Convention in their treatment of prisoners of war. The British and the Americans had annihilated Dresden during a bombing campaign, causing a firestorm in which more than twenty thousand people lost their lives. And the Soviets, in their turn, were trying to blame the 1942 Katyn Massacre on the Nazis, while the mass execution of sixteen thousand Polish military and police officers and six thousand members of Poland’s intelligentsia actually had been commissioned by the Soviet secret police

Question 2

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague is the youngest offspring of the Nuremberg Tribunal. What significant limitations does the ICC face in its efforts to try individual perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes?

Answer 2

• its jurisdiction is limited in three important ways. First, according to Article 11 of the Rome Statute, it has jurisdiction only over crimes committed after its statute entered into force, thus limiting its temporal jurisdiction to crimes committed after 1 July 2002. It can go to other juristic if the unsecurity council demands it. Another limitation is they don’t have a private police force rely on the state to get the individual being persecuted
• Second, the ICC is restricted in its geographical scope. Since it is a treaty-based judicial mechanism, Article 12 only gives it jurisdiction over crimes committed by a national of a state party or crimes committed on the territory of a state party.
• Articles 1 and 17 of the Rome Statute limit the Court’s jurisdiction in a third important way by stating ‘that it shall be complementary to national jurisdictions’. The ICC is only a court of last resort. It can only investigate or prosecute cases when a state that has jurisdiction over it is unwilling or unable to do so. In other words, if US military personnel should be charged with crimes, proper investigations by the US and, if warranted, prosecutions would keep the Court from functioning.
• National-level trial of Juntas during cold war
• Yugoslavia and Rwanda adhoc ICC permanent

Question 3

what did the rejection of Göring’s argumentation mean for the concept of national sovereignty as a building block of the Westphalian state system?

Answer 3

Gorings argumentation:
* He didn’t know anything about the killings and theres no evidence to suggests he did
* Actions in war were to defend from the other nations

By holding Nazi leaders like Göring accountable for their actions, the Nuremberg Trials established the precedent that sovereignty does not shield individuals or states from responsibility for egregious crimes committed against humanity.
* Westphalian sovereignty, is a principle in international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory