| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by William J. Aceves and Vienna Colucci |
| Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) convened its 2006 Legal Network conference, Fulfilling the Legacy: International Justice 60 Years After Nuremberg, at the University of Washington School of Law. The conference brought together scholars and practitioners to consider the legacy of the Nuremberg Tribunal and its impact on human rights. |
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by John Shattuck |
| My starting point tonight is one of the great ironies of history. Who would have thought that the city most often associated with Nazi Germany would later become the birthplace of the modern human rights movement? Nuremberg, after all, was where Hitler rallied his supporters, where millions of Nazis staged demonstrations, where Leni Riefenstahl made her notorious Nazi propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will. But when the Nazis were finally defeated, Nuremberg was also the place where their leaders were brought to account, where Nazi crimes were prosecuted, and where international human rights were first enforced. |
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by David Matas |
| The Nuremberg Tribunal, established in 1945, was abolished in 1948 with half its docket unprosecuted, including Kurt Waldheim who later went on to become Secretary General of the United Nations and President of Austria. Moreover, there were many thousands not yet identified, not yet charged that would have been caught by a full blown prosecution effort. The Genocide Convention, which was approved and proposed for signature by the General Assembly in 1948, assumed an international criminal court would come into being. |
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by Naomi Roht-Arriaza |
| Good morning. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg established some bedrock principles of international law: individual accountability for crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, including what we now call genocide, and war crimes. Nuremberg also established that there was no immunity from individual prosecution based on the official position of the defendant, whether it be as head of state or some other. It also established the idea that international crimes are crimes whether or not they’re criminalized in domestic law. It established the idea that basic due process needs to be respected, even in dealing with the worst butchers. It established definitions of crimes against humanity that still largely embody the current definition. It established the potential responsibility of private actors, like corporations, that aid and abet genocide or crimes against humanity and much more. I’m not going to talk about any of that. |
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by Matt Eisenbrandt |
| Good morning. I’m going to talk about the legacy of Nuremberg as it is being implemented here in the United States, in particular through the work that I do for the Center of Justice and Accountability. As Naomi mentioned, I think the key idea that came out of Nuremberg is individual accountability and a part of that I think is the notion of what we now call “command responsibility” - that the people at the top are as responsible as those who actually carried out the crimes. I very much liked the quote about these are not the people who have blood on their hands because they won’t do that. |
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by Sita Balthazar |
| When I arrived at the International Criminal Court for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania in 1999, the Tribunal was on a mission to bring to light the sexual violence that had taken place during the genocide. I barely had had time to walk through the building’s metal detectors and already, unbeknownst to me, I had been drafted into the mission. My desk was piled with files filled with hundreds of pages of testimony by Rwandan women. |
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by Susana SàCouto |
| Good morning. As we just heard, in the past decade, and particularly since 1998, there’s been an incredible transformation in the treatment of sexual and gender-based violence in international humanitarian and criminal law. Before this, as both Sita Balthazar and our moderator have alluded to, crimes committed exclusively or disproportionately against women and girls in times of conflict were largely either ignored or, at most, treated as secondary to other crimes. As Sita mentioned, the crime of rape was not expressly included in the charters of the Nuremberg Tribunal or the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. |
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by Joseph Margulies |
| Our objective is to talk with you about the contours of the administration’s post-9/11 detention policy, and we’ve decided to organize our remarks in this way. There are four components to this policy. If we’re talking about fair trial norms, what you will see is that the administration manipulates these four components to ensure that a trial will never occur. |
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by Richard J. Wilson |
| Our topic today is the status of fair trial norms. I’m going to focus on the U.S.'s use of military commissions at Guantánamo. There are a couple of documents in the CLE materials that you might find useful as additional background. One is my article entitled “War Stories,” which is about representing Omar Khadr in habeas corpus proceedings in the federal courts of the United States.& The other is a submission to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Omar’s behalf, seeking precautionary measures to protect him as a child charged with war crimes before a military commission. |
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by Margaret Satterthwaite |
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Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has used the discourse and authorizing rules of the laws of war while simultaneously flouting many of the limiting and protective rules of that regime, at times labeling them “quaint” and irrelevant. Simultaneously, the Administration insists that the due process rights guaranteed by human rights law are not applicable to this new “war,” arguing alternatively that the relevant norms do not apply to extraterritorial conduct and that human rights law does not apply in situations of armed conflict. As to those standards it does concede applicability – such as the prohibition on torture – the Administration has attempted to define away the rule. The effect is to take many U.S. actions in the “War on Terror” outside of both frameworks, dealing a blow to the rule of law.
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by Richard Herz |
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Thank you. I am very grateful to Amnesty International and the University of Washington School of Law for affording me the opportunity to speak at what has been a terrific conference. I am going to talk today about the Alien Tort Statute, and specifically about ATS litigation against corporations. The cases I will discuss involve multinational oil and mining companies.
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| Volume 10 - Issue 1 |
| Written by Susan Burke |
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Well, last speaker of the conference. I don't know about all of you, but I've certainly learned a tremendous amount here, and it's been a wonderful day. My name is Susan Burke, and I'm going to speak briefly on three topics.
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