If we are to embrace this vision for international war crimes trials, we must make a fundamental choice about the type of trial we use. One is to proceed in a narrowly focused, clinical fashion, apparently oblivious to any issue not directly relevant to the guilt or innocence of the individual charged. The second model is to commit to the exposition of the larger picture, to paint the broad and complex historical fresca, not only to expose and record individual guilt but to exploit the dramatic stage of the trail to construct the collective memo-ries upon which both victims and perpetrators, indeed whole nations, will be cleansed of their brutal past. A commitment to the latter model has considerable appeal. However, one questions whether it is realistic for a criminal prosecutor to undertake the task of an historian.
History leaves room for doubt.
It is a fluid project, a story in motion, which strives for a reconstruction of the past informed, understood and therefore revised in light of the present and even of the future. Justice, on the other hand, imposes irreversible conclusions. It binds itself to a permanent and official interpretation of facts. As physician and bioethicist Michael Grondin has argued, the Nuremberg Code became the hallmark for all subsequent discourse on the ethics of human experimentation. Because the code was written in response to the acts of a scientific and medical community out of control, it is not surprising that voluntary informed consent was its critical centerpiece and the protection of human subjects its paramount concern.