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Action after World War I led to the creation of the League of Nations. During World War II, a War Crimes Commission was set up, which led to the proceedings before the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Tribunal's judgement was a foundation for the development of international human rights law by the UN.

This chapter describes the new constitution and the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. It talks about the ‘unconditional’ surrender. It also presents some characteristics of the reform period of the American occupation. Democracy was not to be imposed. The chapter then explains the sabotaged democracy. In addition, it discusses the war crimes and the Far Eastern Military Tribunal. The revival of political parties under the occupation period is reported. The major concern of the Shidehara government was to put an end to the ‘aberration’ of wartime military rule and to return to pre-war parliamentary politics or what was known as Taisho democracy. Political parties took advantage of the Potsdam Declaration.

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.

“New justice” ideas concerning the validity of post-war prosecution entered the revision of the Geneva Conventions in an expected way. The International Committee of the Red Cross was not willing initially to get involved in war crimes trials after World War Two, considering them exercises in victor's justice. One delegate even lobbied Great Britain to halt war crimes trials. However, other Red Cross officials favored criminal prosecution to ensure compliance with the Geneva Conventions in the future, as long as there were adequate safeguards for the accused. International jurists, some with ties to the Nuremberg proceedings and to international criminal law, supported universal jurisdiction and an international criminal court for violations, but British and U.S. officials opposed them. In the end, the creation of the “grave breaches” provisions in the Geneva Conventions synthesized traditional legal concepts with “new justice” ideas.

Legal groups devoted to building international criminal law between 1919 and 1939 were rarely concerned with the rights of minorities or what are today called “human rights.” During World War Two, an organization that had been involved in minority rights, but not criminal prosecution—the World Jewish Congress—began developing new legal theories to prosecute Nazis who had planned and ordered crimes against Jews inside and outside of Germany. This was a challenging legal problem because many of these crimes were not covered under the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The World Jewish Congress successfully lobbied Allied government to include crimes against the Jews at the first Nuremberg trial and contributed a major legal brief that heavily influenced the U.S. prosecution. However, the Congress’ ultimate impact on the legal judgment was limited. Its main contribution was to advance a new concept of a “victim-centered” justice that included trials, restitution, and reparations

This chapter focuses on the creation of the OCC, the organization responsible for overseeing the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT) trials. Section 1 discusses the approval of JCS 1023/10, the directive issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in July 1945 that first authorized the U.S. military to conduct trials in the American zone of occupation. Section 2 addresses the Allied Control Council's enactment of Control Council Law No. 10, the U.S. decision to create the NMTs, and Telford Taylor's appointment as the head of the Subsequent Proceedings Division (SPD), the forerunner to the OCC. Section 3 examines the early logistical issues that limited the SPD's ability to create a comprehensive prosecutorial program, the most important of which was the prospect of a second International Military Tribunal trial. Throughout, the chapter emphasizes the role debates over whether industrialists should be prosecuted for international crimes played in the development of the Allied war-crimes program.

This chapter first charts the complex dynamics that have pushed students from school and pulled them toward the criminal justice system, setting up the terms of a black prison diaspora that are maintained throughout the book. It then argues that harsh school disciplinary policies, emerging from the punishing culture of the War on Crime era, curtail youth academic achievement and accelerate incarceration risk in the African American community. It describes how the concentrated effect of punishment has a destabilizing effect on the African American community and the American democratic project as a whole, while benefiting larger social, political, and economic strategies in a neoliberal and postindustrial context.

This chapter tells the story of the OSS Field Photographic Unit (FPU) and its impact on American cinema and society. Led by the legendary Hollywood film director John Ford, the FPU produced training, reconnaissance and propaganda films for the CIA’s wartime predecessor. In doing so, it is argued here, they made a significant contribution to what theorist Paul Virilio termed “the logistics of perception”, or the ways and means by which war is perceived. By helping to transform the second-hand experience of war from a predominantly textual to a mostly visual experience, the FPU left a profound legacy.

After World War One, jurists on the Commission on Responsibilities at the Paris Peace Conference were divided about the types of criminal penalties the Allies should impose on political and military figures from the Central Powers. European jurists favored the creation of an international tribunal, an innovation which U.S. jurists viewed as unprecedented and politically dangerous. Ultimately, there were no post-war extraditions or international tribunals because the Allies lost political interest, the defeated powers resisted, and the League of Nations’ Secretariat did not want to intervene. Still, European jurists on the Commission outlined an important set of ideas: post-war prosecution for war crimes was legitimate, an international tribunal was the best legal forum to present the victors’ political and moral perspective, and international law should be modernized to restore the moral order. Critics called the idea of prosecuting war criminals “the new justice” and contrasted it to the “old justice,” based on national laws and established procedures.

This chapter discusses the apologist role of courts, in which they serve as a legitimating agency for state action. The first case study shows how the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) contributed to the creation and legitimization of a segregated regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territories by providing the state with the legal tools required to design and implement it. The HCJ has done this through the selective use (and misuse) of the law of military occupation. The second case study examines the jurisprudence of the Serbian War Crimes Chamber (WCC). The WCC is one of the few domestic courts in the world to prosecute its own nationals for war crimes committed in a conflict that ended just a few years before the court's creation. More generally, it deciphers the legitimating role of a national court which exercises criminal jurisdiction over former government officials.

This chapter outlines the wartime debate among lawyers, politicians, and diplomats on how to deal with the unprecedented criminality of the Axis powers, notably of Nazi Germany. Both national and transnational, the discussion led to the decision to try ‘major’ criminals before an international tribunal which was to be established and run by the four main Allies. The chapter then moves on to show how different legal concepts and traditions, but also varying political objectives, were reconciled and sometimes glossed over at the London Conference in 1945 which set up the IMT. Serious shortcomings, notably in the selection of defendants, would later hamper the first, major trial, while organization-building in the four delegations was fraught with difficulties, material and personal. Finally, the chapter illustrates the avenues through which ideas about German divergence travelled to Nuremberg and came to inform the trial design.

Despite intellectual strides in the ideas of the “new justice” between 1919–1950 and their partial realization after 1945, prospects were weak at the start of the Cold War that international criminal enforcement could fundamentally alter the international system or prevent various types of violence—violations of the laws and customs of war, aggressive war, terrorism, and genocide. There were four major problems: domestic legal retribution or even private vengeance dominated many post-war European countries; new bodies in the United Nations had extremely limited powers of enforcement; Cold War politics blocked the debate on the creation of a permanent international criminal court and global penal code; and organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Bureau for the Unification of Criminal Law could not pursue criminal enforcement because of other internal concerns.

This chapter explains how and why public schools and prisons have collaborated in the War on Crime era. It shows that the punitive shift in education catalyzes youth correctional vulnerability while serving larger social and political needs. Specifically, it documents the powerful influences of market forces in shaping school security expansion and what has been called the “at-risk youth industry.” As public schools have employed a correctional approach to education, they have established students' initial approach to correctional custody. In demonstrating how youths experience punitive schooling within the correctional spectrum of the at-risk youth industry, nationally and in New Orleans, the chapter revisits and revises current theories of the school-to-prison pipeline.

This chapter discusses the controversies surrounding the Yasukuni Shrine. Firstly, was the frustration among Japan's conservatives with what many saw as Chinese intervention in the effort to legitimize the shrine; secondly, was the inclusion in the Yasukuni Shrine of those deemed class-A war criminals during the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals; and, finally, was the unresolved question in Japan about just what kind of state support ought to be given to Japan's veterans and their families. The Yasukuni Shrine was closely associated with the calculus of Japan's war responsibility, and its worst crisis of identity, the inclusion of those class-A war criminals in the late 1970s, coincided with Japan's debate over normalizing its relations with China. By the twenty-first century, however, the Yasukuni Shrine was no longer simply a place to honor Japan's war dead, but a site for rejecting foreign criticism of its history in the twentieth century.

This chapters covers the federal government’s “War on Crime” as initiated by the Johnson and continued by the Nixon Administration. The chapter also introduces the Nixon-Ford appointments to the court. Suspensions of the executions in Florida are discussed under Furman v. Georgia, (1972). U.S. Attorney John Briggs who replaced Edward Boardman is introduced. Extensive coverage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 and how it was used in the district to fight organized crime is explained and introduced. Prosecutions of Florida organized crime figures such as Santo Trafficante and Harlan Blackburn are covered. The chapter also covers the activity of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), and especially the activities of its operatives in the Democratic Primary in Florida (1972) and their subsequent capture and arraignment. The last part of the chapter deals with the prosecution of Senator Ed Gurney, Finally, the prosecution of Sen. Ed Gurney for ethics violations is covered.

The chapter examines the legal and doctrinal sources of the responsibility to protect people from war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. It explores its practice, most importantly in Libya 2011, and identifies the challenges to its continued efficacy that that intervention caused.