Victor’s Justice? Cultural Transfer and Public Imagery from Nuremberg to The Hague

Gilad Ben-Nun

doi:10.1515/pol-2019-0002

Article

Victor’s Justice? Cultural Transfer and Public Imagery from Nuremberg to The Hague

Gilad Ben-Nun
Dr. Gilad Ben-Nun is a historian of modern international law at Leipzig University’s Centre for Area Studies. A graduate of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and Leipzig University (PHD), from 2016 to 2018, he was awarded an EU Marie Curie Individual Fellowship at Verona University’s Law department, writing a monograph on the history of the 4th Geneva Convention for Civilians of 1949. Between 2001 and 2009 he served with the UN, first as Ford Foundation Research Fellow at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), and later as a Middle East Program officer in the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). In 2017, his previous monograph on refugee law and the history of the 1951 Refugee Convention was nominated as the single finalist in the category of archive-based research books of the 2017 US National Jewish Book Award.

Published/Copyright: April 12, 2019

Published by

Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Author Information Explore this Subject

From the journal Pólemos Volume 13 Issue 1

Abstract

At the heart of this paper lies the perennial problem of the legitimacy of tribunals judging war criminals and the role of public imagery in countering Victor’s Justice challenges. The paper follows along the paths of components of the cultural transfer from Nuremberg and Tokyo international tribunals (1946–1948) for the prosecution of war criminals post World War II through the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague (1993), focusing on two specific ‘carriers’ of this cultural transfer: “Law” and “Architecture.” By Law, I mean the copying and re-application of similar legal procedures, the active participation of certain people within two of the three instances, and even the carrying forward of physical pieces of evidence from one trial to another. By Architecture, I mean the actual construction of the trial chamber in all three places. The location of the judges’ bench, the defendants’ dock, the witnesses stand, and the inter-relational architectural flow which became characteristic of each of these Lieux de Justice. In terms of public imagery, important counter measures to Victor’s-Justice claims also included the ample facilitation of journalist coverage, the provision of full translation services for the defendants (countering claims of linguistic non-misunderstanding), and the holding of the defendants in humane conditions of incarceration, in a somewhat deliberate juxtaposing countenance to their own crimes which habitually included concentration camps and harshly inhumane incarceration facilities. The paper concludes with a recalibration of Hannah Arendt’s mistaken claim vis-à-vis Eichmann, in contrast to her important understandings concerning the banality of evil.

Keywords: international criminal tribunals; nuremberg tribunal; Eichmann trial; victors’ justice; law; architecture; public imagery

About the author

Gilad Ben-Nun

Dr. Gilad Ben-Nun is a historian of modern international law at Leipzig University’s Centre for Area Studies. A graduate of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and Leipzig University (PHD), from 2016 to 2018, he was awarded an EU Marie Curie Individual Fellowship at Verona University’s Law department, writing a monograph on the history of the 4th Geneva Convention for Civilians of 1949. Between 2001 and 2009 he served with the UN, first as Ford Foundation Research Fellow at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), and later as a Middle East Program officer in the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). In 2017, his previous monograph on refugee law and the history of the 1951 Refugee Convention was nominated as the single finalist in the category of archive-based research books of the 2017 US National Jewish Book Award.

Note

This article was initially drafted under EU Project REQUE-2 (EU Grant # 701275), a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship at Verona University Law Department, and later benefited from the support of MA & PHD program in Global Studies with a Focus on Peace and security in Africa, run jointly by Leipzig University and Addis Ababa University’s Institute for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS). The author is indebted to Annalisa Ciampi for her thoughts, inspirational ideas, and most of all for her friendship & Leipzig University’s Centre for Area Studies.

Published Online: 2019-04-12

Published in Print: 2019-04-24

You are currently not able to access this content.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/pol-2019-0002

Keywords for this article

international criminal tribunals; nuremberg tribunal; Eichmann trial; victors’ justice; law; architecture; public imagery