International Criminal Tribunals

History

Although there have been earlier instances of trials with judges from more than one country, the father of the modern idea of an international criminal tribunal is Gustave Moynier, one of the founders of the Red Cross, who formulated it in 1872. However, even after World War I, the idea of a permanent international criminal court, briefly mooted in the League of Nations, was rejected as “premature.” It fell to individuals and nongovernmental organizations to keep the idea alive. Crimes committed before and during World War II prompted a renewed call for establishing a permanent international criminal court, but instead ad hoc international tribunals were created at Nuremberg and Tokyo. Although the creation of these special tribunals could be faulted for imposing a kind of “victor's justice” on the accused, and for trying them for offenses that were newly defined as “crimes,” the tribunals were widely accepted as legitimate. As the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1968) observed, “The Nuremberg tribunal, an ambiguous body, was no doubt born of the right of the strongest; but at the same time it opened a perspective for the future by setting a precedent, the embryo of a tradition” (p. 42).

Peoples' Tribunals

The idea of an international criminal court received a new, much more radical impetus with the [Page 930]institution of the Russell Tribunals since 1967. The first Russell Tribunal was an initiative in opposition to the Vietnam War by two august political philosophers, Lord Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. It mimicked judicial procedure to the extent that it examined evidence and sought to establish on the basis of the evidence whether—or, rather, that—the United States was breaking existing rules of humanitarian law. But it recognized that it was powerless and hence decided not to pass a sentence. The tribunal members were intended to be a “jury of conscience” rather than judges.

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