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Several war crimes trials are well-known to scholars, but others have received far less attention. This book assesses a number of these little-studied trials to recognise institutional innovations, clarify doctrinal debates, and identify their general relevance to the development of international criminal law.
List of contents
- 1: Kevin Jon Heller and Gerry Simpson: Introduction
- Part 1: Pre-Histories: From Von Hagenbach to The Armenian Genocide
- 2: Gregory S. Gordon: The trial of Peter von Hagenbach: Reconciling history, historiography, and international criminal law
- 3: Benjamin Brockman-Hawe: A supranational criminal tribunal for the colonial era: the Franco-Siamese Mixed Court
- 4: Jennifer Balint: The Ottoman state special military tribunal for the Genocide of the Armenians: 'Doing government business'
- Part 2: European Histories I: Prosecuting Atrocity
- 5: Rosa Ana Alija-Fernández: Justice for no-land's men? United States military trials against Spanish Kapos in Mauthausen and universal jurisdiction
- 6: Dov Jacobs: A narrative of justice and the (re)writing of history: French trials after World War II
- 7: Frédéric Mégret: The Bordeaux Trial: Prosecuting the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre
- Part 3: European Histories II: Americans in Europe
- 8: Grietje Baars: Capitalism's victor's justice? Prosecution of industrialists post WWII
- 9: Stephen Vladeck: Eisentrager's (Forgotten) Merits: Military commissions and collateral review
- Part 4: European Histories III: Contemporary Trials
- 10: Benedetta Faedi Duramy: Making peace with the past: Federal Republic of Germany's accountability for World War II massacres before the Italian Supreme Court
- 11: Tamás Hoffman: Trying communism through international criminal law? The experiences of the Hungarian historical justice trials
- 12: Rain Liivoja: Competing Histories: Soviet war crimes in the Baltic States
- 13: Julia Selman-Ayetey: Universal jurisdiction: Conflict and contoversy in Norway
- Part 5: African Histories
- 14: Jackson Maogoto: Reading the shadows of history: The bridges between Turkish and Ethiopian 'internationalised' domestic crime trials
- 15: Firew Kebede Tiba: Mass trials and modes of responsibility for international crimes: Ethiopia
- Part 6: Southern Histories
- 16: Georgina Fitzpatrick: War crimes trials, victor's justice, and Australian military justice in the aftermath of the second world war
- 17: Narrelle Morris: Justice for 'Asian' victims: Australian war crimes trials of the Japanese 1945-51
- 18: Peter Rush: Dirty war crimes: Jurisdictions of memory and international criminal law
- Part 7: Histories of a Type: Excavating the Crime of Aggression
- 21: Roger Clark: The crime of aggression: From the trial of Takashi Sakai in August 1946 to the Kampala Review Conference in 2010
- 22: Mark Drumbl: 'Germans are the lords and Poles are the servants': The trial of Arthur Greiser in Poland, 1946
- 23: Immi Tallgren: The Finnish war-responsibility trial in 1945-56: Flawed justice, anxious peace?
About the author
Kevin Jon Heller is a Associate Professor and Reader at Melbourne Law School, where he teaches criminal law and international criminal law. He has a JD from Stanford Law School, an MA in literature from Duke University, an MA and BA in social and political theory from the New School for Social Research, all with honors and a PhD from Leiden University. His work has appeared in the European Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, the Michigan Law Review, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and many others. On the practical side, Kevin has been involved in the International Criminal Court's negotiations over the crime of aggression, served as Human Rights Watch's external legal advisor on the trial of Saddam Hussein, and has consulted with the defense in a number of cases at the ICTY and ICTR.
Gerry Simpson holds the Kenneth Bailey Chair of International Law at the University of Melbourne. He also is currently an Open Society Fellow (based in Tbilisi). Gerry was a Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics (until 2008) and has been a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University (1996- 1998) and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School (1999).
Summary
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Several instances of war crimes trials are familiar to all scholars, but in order to advance understanding of the development of international criminal law, it is important to provide a full range of evidence from less-familiar trials. This book therefore provides an essential resource for a more comprehensive overview, uncovering and exploring some of the lesser-known war crimes trials that have taken place in a variety of contexts: international and domestic, northern and southern, historic and contemporary. It analyses these trials with a view to recognising institutional innovations, clarifying doctrinal debates, and identifying their general relevance to contemporary international criminal law. At the same time, the book recognises international criminal law's history of suppression or sublimation: What stories has the discipline refused to tell? What stories have been displaced by the ones it has told? Has international criminal law's framing or telling of these stories excluded other possibilities? And - perhaps most important of all - how can recovering the lost stories and imagining new narrative forms reconfigure the discipline?
Many of the trials examined in this book have hardly ever before been discussed; others have been examined only in the most cursory manner. Indeed, until now, no volume has been dedicated to telling the story of these trials, that have yet to find a place in the international criminal law canon. Providing a detailed analysis of these trials, which took place in Europe, Africa, South America, and Australasia, in both historical and contemporary contexts, this book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the development of international criminal law.
Foreword
Part of the OAPEN-UK project
Additional text
Heller and Simpson's work is an outstanding accomplishment since it throws light on many themes that were previously rarely explored.
