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Setting the Path for the UNWCC: The Representation of European Exile Governments on the London International Assembly and the Commission for Penal Reconstruction and Development, 1941–1944
Abstract
This article discusses the development of the UNWCC and the intellectuals involved. It notes the commitment that smaller Allied states made to frame international criminal law with regard to war crimes. The article pays particular attention to two Czech delegates who stood out from the community of experts, and who were instrumental in formalizing how war crimes committed in Europe during the Second World War – and beyond – should be handled. The concept of crimes against humanity became a main outcome of the legal debates, serving not only as a blueprint for the London Charter, but the international criminal law system as a whole. The predecessors of the UNWCC, involving some of the most renowned lawyers of the time, formed one of the first truly transnational networks. Moreover, the experiences of the lawyers, and their framing of that experience in lengthy memorandums, helped to generate a new concept in politics: the protection of human rights.
... The Nuremberg legacy was debated in the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), which carried on its work until 1948. The Soviets did not participate in the UNWCC, but their subsequent efforts complemented that of the UNWCC, making this book a welcome contribution to that topic (Lewis, 2014;Plesch, 2017;Von Lingen, 2014). Hirsch recalls that the Soviets, British and Americans had different ideas about how to achieve post-war justice and the nature of the trials. ...
The African Union Assembly of Head of States and Governments, in June 2014, adopted the Malabo Protocol empowering the African Court of Justice and Human Rights with international criminal jurisdiction. While this is a welcome development in the pursuit of criminal justice for human rights violations in Africa, it has however been overshadowed by academic indifference, mostly with regards to discrepancies that may arise in the jurisdictional relationship between the already existing International Criminal Court and the Proposed African Criminal Court. As such, while the coming into force of the African Criminal Court still awaits fruition, its possibility has garnered scholarly debates supporting and opposing the African Criminal Court having the mandate to prosecute international crimes. This chapter explores relevant provisions of the Malabo protocol, and the ideal of regionalizing the enforcement of international criminal law. Extrapolating from these, the chapter addresses from a neutral perspective whether the proposed African Regional Court is a feasible option within the existing framework of international criminal justice.KeywordsInternational criminal lawRegional criminal lawInternational Criminal CourtAfrican Criminal CourtNuremberg PrinciplesAlternative jurisdiction
Delving into world-spanning legal agencies, histories of exiled diplomats and lawyers, this paper explores how Free France defended at the United Nations War Crimes Commission the vision of the interwar liberal order, one that reached across the global territories of the mandate system administered by the League of Nations, into the colonial territories of the French empire. From London to Chongqing, facing Vichy collaborationist authoritarian dictatorship in metropolitan France and anti-colonial pressures from the turbulent colonial frontiers, a handful of Free French jurists and politicians worked day and night to establish the imperial sovereignty of the French exile committee of general Charles de Gaulle, and restore French republicanism rooted in the legal tradition of Nicolas Fouquet, Jacques de Maleville and Léon Duguit. Drawing upon newly-unsealed UN and French archival materials, this paper documents Free France’s intervention at the UNWCC , the activities of its representatives and reflection on empires, race and international law.
In the midst of the Second World War, the Allies acknowledged Germany's ongoing programme of extermination. In the Shadow of the Holocaust examines the struggle to attain post-war justice and prosecution. Focusing on Poland's engagement with the United Nations War Crimes Commission, it analyses the different ways that the Polish Government in Exile (based in London from 1940) agitated for an Allied response to German atrocities. Michael Fleming shows that jurists associated with the Government in Exile made significant contributions to legal debates on war crimes and, along with others, paid attention to German crimes against Jews. By exploring the relationship between the UNWCC and the Polish War Crimes Office under the authority of the Polish Government in Exile and later, from the summer of 1945, the Polish Government in Warsaw, Fleming provides a new lens through which to examine the early stages of the Cold War.
This article addresses the normative framework of the concept of “crimes against humanity” from the perspective of intellectual history, by scrutinizing legal debates of marginalized (and exiled) academic–juridical actors within the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). Decisive for its successful implementation were two factors: the growing scale of mass violence against civilians during the Second World War, and the strong support and advocacy of “peripheral actors,” jurists forced into exile in London by the war. These jurists included representatives of smaller Allied countries from around the world, who used the commission's work to push for a codification of international law, which finally materialized during the London Conference of August 1945. This article studies the process of mediation and the emergence of legal concepts. It thereby introduces the concept of “legal flows” to highlight the different strands and older traditions of humanitarian law involved in coining new law. The experience of exile is shown to have had a significant constitutive function in the globalization of a concept (that of “crimes against humanity”).
Dealing with Democrats. The British Foreign Office and the Czechoslovak Emigre´es in Great Britain
- For
- M D Overview
- Brown
For an overview, see M. D. Brown, Dealing with Democrats. The British Foreign Office and the Czechoslovak Emigre´es in Great Britain, 1939–1945 (
17) 61; for Stransky's view on war crimes policy
- Stehlik
Stehlik (n 17) 61; for Stransky's view on war crimes policy, see D. M. Segesser, Recht statt Rache oder Rache statt Recht? Die Ahndung von Kriegsverbrechen in der internationalen wissenschaftlichen Debatte, 1872–1945 (
Koskenniemi refers to an unpublished paper from Lauterpachts Private Collected Papers Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals
- G J Cambridge
- Bass
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 390. Koskenniemi refers to an unpublished paper from Lauterpachts Private Collected Papers, vol 3, 462–503. 61 G. J. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2000) 58–105;
Die Leipziger Prozesse Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und ihre strafrechtliche Verfolgung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg
- G Hankel
G. Hankel, Die Leipziger Prozesse. Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und ihre strafrechtliche Verfolgung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2003);
The Road to Nuremberg
- An See
- B Smith
90 See for an overview B. Smith, The Road to Nuremberg (New York, Basic Books, 1981).