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

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 interrelational 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