scholarly journals LEGAL FLOWS: CONTRIBUTIONS OF EXILED LAWYERS TO THE CONCEPT OF “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 507-525
Author(s):  
KERSTIN VON LINGEN
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Successful Implementation ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
World War ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Constitutive Function ◽  
Second World

This article addresses the normative framework of the concept of “crimes against humanity” from the perspective of intellectual history, by scrutinizing legal debates of marginalized (and exiled) academic–juridical actors within the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). Decisive for its successful implementation were two factors: the growing scale of mass violence against civilians during the Second World War, and the strong support and advocacy of “peripheral actors,” jurists forced into exile in London by the war. These jurists included representatives of smaller Allied countries from around the world, who used the commission's work to push for a codification of international law, which finally materialized during the London Conference of August 1945. This article studies the process of mediation and the emergence of legal concepts. It thereby introduces the concept of “legal flows” to highlight the different strands and older traditions of humanitarian law involved in coining new law. The experience of exile is shown to have had a significant constitutive function in the globalization of a concept (that of “crimes against humanity”).

The First Wave of International War Crimes Trials: Istanbul and Leipzig

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN KRAMER
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
International War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World ◽  
Foundation Stone

The Nuremberg tribunal following the Second World War is universally considered as the foundation stone of international law with regard to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It may come as a surprise, however, to learn that the first international attempts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity came at the end of the First World War, with trials held at Allied prompting in Turkey and Germany.

Appointment

1969 ◽  
Vol 9 (102) ◽  
pp. 491-491 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Committee ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
World War ◽  
East European ◽  
Middle East Countries ◽  
Wide Experience ◽  
Second World

Mr. Raymond Courvoisier has since 1 August 1969 taken over the appointment of special assistant to the President of the International Committee, thus bringing it his wide experience in the field of international humanitarian law. It should, in fact, be recalled that from 1936 to 1945 he undertook a large number of missions in ICRC service as delegate in Spain, Turkey, in East European and Middle East countries. Furthermore, he was in charge of a section in the Central Prisoners of War Agency in Geneva during the Second World War.

scholarly journals THE INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW APPLICABLE IN THE NEW TYPES OF ARMED CONFLICTS

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 184-193
Author(s):  
Nicolae David Ungureanu
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Second World

The international humanitarian law applicable in armed conflicts has evolved continuously since antiquity until today, its doctrinal writings pointing out during the modern period the influence that the progress of the concepts and the practices of war has had on the development of the normative conventions, especially the first and second world war, resulting in texts that are applicable even today.

Building a Case against the War Criminals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Aszkielowicz
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Agreements ◽  
Second World War ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
World War ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

Long before the Second World War ended, the Allies were planning to prosecute Axis war criminals, including both those in positions of leadership and the perpetrators of individual crimes. There was no standing war crimes court at the end of the Second World War, however, and the post-war trials were a watershed in international law. For the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo, Allied planners drew on the development of international humanitarian law and international agreements signed by the combatants over the decades preceding the war. The vast majority of war criminals who were prosecuted did not face the court at Nuremberg or Tokyo: they appeared before national military tribunals which were conducted according to each prosecuting country’s war crimes law. The Australian War Crimes Act passed through the parliament in October 1945, shortly before trials began.

Betraying their Motherland: Soviet Military Tribunals of Izmenniki Rodiny in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, 1941–1953

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire P. Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
World War ◽  
International Military Tribunal ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Military Tribunal ◽  
Second World

The immediate aftermath of the Second World War saw a transnational effort to identify and prosecute those individuals who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in such fora as the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. However, parallel national processes were carried out across Europe to punish those citizens who, by a range of definitions, allegedly collaborated with enemy occupiers and committed treason. In the Soviet Union, suspected collaborators were tried as counterrevolutionaries in both the areas where crimes were committed and also those distant from regions of German or Romanian occupation. By examining tribunals in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in this article, I argue for the importance of identifying and prosecuting alleged collaborators to the Soviet postwar project – a project which was far from limited to areas in the western parts of the country and which remained intimately linked to prewar, Stalinist understandings of justice and revolution.

2. An intellectual poison?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Dodds
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Critical Geopolitics ◽  
World War ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
Second World

The notion of geopolitics has not always been well received. It has been accused of being intellectually fraudulent, ideologically suspect, and tainted with associations with Nazism and fascism. ‘An intellectual poison?’ charts a brief history of geopolitics from before the Second World War to the present day looking at its origins, development, and reception. What is critical geopolitics? Geopolitics has attracted a great deal of academic and popular attention, often with little appreciation of its controversial intellectual history. Presidents and political commentators seem to love using the term: they associate it with danger, threats, space, and power. It is often used to make predictions about the future direction of politics.

On What Is Strictly Speaking True

1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Travis
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
English Expression ◽  
Second World

Let us begin with a piece of intellectual history. The story begins in a period encapsulating the second world war – say the ‘40’s, give and take a bit. Around then, it began to be argued with force that an expression – e.g., an English one – while it well might mean something, does not say anything, and notably (in typical cases at least) no one thing in particular. The principal behind the argument was surely J.L. Austin, though, I would claim, the same point was argued in a somewhat different way by Wittgenstein. The intended point was not merely a grammatical one: we say of an expression that it means such and such, but not that it says such and such. Be that as it may, the main point was quite substantive: typically, an (e.g.) English expression is such that, with its meaning (unambiguously) fixed, there are a variety of distinct (perhaps better: distinguishable) things to be said in using it on some production of it or other.

Part I Histories, Ch.10 Hans Kelsen and the Return of Universalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
von Bernstorff Jochen
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
Second World

This chapter illustrates the deep structure of the Kelsenian approach to international law from an intellectual history perspective. Hans Kelsen (1881–1973) was a Viennese law professor in between the two world wars, who is seen by many as one of the most outstanding, if not the most outstanding, jurist of the twentieth century. Therefore studying the Kelsenian approach includes the political, doctrinal, and philosophical context in which Kelsen developed his fundamental critique of the then-prevailing German international law theory. Furthermore, the chapter reveals the subversive and revolutionary force of Kelsen’s critical methodology with a couple of examples, concluding with a few words on how German international legal scholarship dealt with Kelsen’s legacy after the Second World War.

Mojżesz Schorr i jego listy do Ludwika Gumplowicza

1998 ◽  
pp. 331-334
Author(s):  
Hanna Kozińska-Witt
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

This chapter looks at Mojżesz Schorr i jego listy do Ludwika Gumplowicza (Moses Schorr and his Letters to Ludwik Gumplowicz), which was edited by Rafał Żebrowski. This is the third volume in a series on two of the major figures in the intellectual history of Polish Jewry, Ludwig Gumplowicz and Reform rabbi Moses Schorr. The first volume is a biography of Schorr. The second is devoted to Gumplowicz and his sons, and the third contains Schorr's correspondence with Gumplowicz in the period 1897 to 1909. All the letters in this volume come from an unpublished legacy of Ludwig Gumplowicz, donated to the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków by his younger son, the socialist Władysław Gumplowicz. All the letters are from Schorr to Gumplowicz, whose answers from Graz were lost in the turmoil of the Second World War.

The contribution of the Emperor Asoka Maurya to the development of the humanitarian ideal in warfare

1995 ◽  
Vol 35 (305) ◽  
pp. 192-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.I.A.D. Draper
Keyword(s):  
War Crimes ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
World War ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
The University ◽  
Legal Staff ◽  
Second World

Gerald Draper (1914–1989) was the foremost specialist in humanitarian law of his generation in the United Kingdom, and was well-respected in the law of war community worldwide. He was a Military Prosecutor in the war crimes trials in Germany after the Second World War, and following his retirement from the Army Legal Staff became a distinguished academic, finishing as Professor of Law at the University of Sussex. Draper was a delegate to many International Conferences of the Red Cross as well as to the Diplomatic Conference which drafted the Additional Protocols of 1977.

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