Source: http://www.ejiltalk.org/was-nuremberg-a-violation-of-the-principle-of-legality/
Timestamp: 2015-04-19 01:04:37
Document Index: 492212987

Matched Legal Cases: ['in dubio', 'in dubio', '§ 132', '§ 134', '§ 134', 'in dubio']

EJIL: Talk! – Was Nuremberg a Violation of the Principle of Legality?
Home EJIL Analysis Was Nuremberg a Violation of the Principle of Legality?	Was Nuremberg a Violation of the Principle of Legality?
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Tamás Hoffmann May 18, 2010 at 21:33
Good post, indeed. I have mixed feelings about “innovation” in international criminal justice: on the one hand, I can accept that judges feel the need to flesh out the “skeletal body of international criminal law” and one can sympathize with the attempts to develop the law in the interest of humanity.
However, this approach of “in dubio pro humanitate” conveniently forgets that the defendants have rights, too. And the principle of in dubio pro reo is supposed to be the cornerstone of criminal law…
(I have a recent article criticizing the ICTY’s approach in this respect
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1531703)
Tamás Hoffmann May 20, 2010 at 7:52
The right link to the paper is the following:
Justinas May 20, 2010 at 18:51
Thanks for the post. Kononov case probably will be one of the landmark cases and it indeed raises a lot of interesting points. One small correction: “he and the unit under his command killed a group of Latvian villagers who collaborated with the Germans.” – actually, his unit killed not only groups of villages who allegedly collaborated with the Germans, bus some more. Not only killed, but some of them, including pregnant women, burned to death. So it is not only the question of combatant vs. combatant, but also… of collateral damage? If we could say that to burn people deliberately is a kind of collateral damage. What is also interesting for me in this decision it is how GC easily applied combatant status. On the one hand, without any doubts it assigned combatant status to Kononov squad even though organised resistance movements were recognised as combatants in GC3, 1949. The state practice to my knowledge during WWII towards this was very much politically influenced and without legal certainties (e.g. Armia Krajowa, Polish underground army in the last weeks of Warsaw uprising was recognised as “allied” combatant forces by Western Allies and Germany, but not by Soviets). Moreover, even GC just “assumed” that villagers were combatants or civilians-directly-participating-in-hostilities in favour for applicants position, this assumption in my view is far too easy. I can hardly believe that even in our days under current IHL reporting to enemy or keeping a gun in a cupboard and two grenades under your bed could qualify for “Direct-participation” not speaking about “combatant”.
On the other hand I can understand that ECHR in principle should not apply humanitarian law as such. However, such game with hypothesis raises more questions than provides answers.
federico May 21, 2010 at 14:54
Two years ago, the Chamber appeared really occupied in stigmatizing the indecent role of Nazi collaborationists of the villagers, a role which made them combatants. It was ready to justify their summary execution–without any evidence and while they were not participating in hostilities–by the components of a militia who wore, unlawfully, the uniform and insigna of the occupier. In a point, the Chamber held that “After arriving at the homes of each of the six heads of family and searching their homes, the Partisans executed them only after rifles and grenades supplied by the Germans – tangible evidence of their collaboration – were found.”(§ 132). The Court went furhter in saying that it was “a targeted military operation consisting in the selective execution of armed collaborators of the Nazi enemy.”(§ 134) Probably in almost all houses in the villages along the border there were weapons. But, more gravely, the six men were executed, i.e. assassinated without trial, on the assumption that owning weapons—hidden inside the house, as none was recognized to carry weapon—equated to participate directly in hostilities. Finally, the Court held that “In point of fact, the operation was scarcely any different from those carried out at the same period by the armed forces of the Allied powers or by local Resistance members in many European countries occupied by Nazi Germany” (§ 134) assuming perhaps that, since Allied powers were killing civilians indiscriminately in so called targeted expeditions, the killings of Mazie Bati were also justified. Probably, at the relevant time, a specific criminal rule was not completely formed. However, the acts committed by the applicant were intrinsically criminal, and the Grand Chamber, choosing a “in dubio pro humanitate” criterion, maybe took the right decision.
Partisanen als Kriegsverbrecher | Verfassungsblog May 21, 2010 at 21:14
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