Law of Genocide and War Crimes Trials

Catalog description

Beginning in November 1945, in an unprecedented attempt to bring war criminals to justice, more than 20 senior government officials and military leaders of Hitler's Third Reich were indicted and tried, in what has become known as the Nuremberg Trial, for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Earlier that fall, the SS commandants, officers and guards who had been arrested by the British upon the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, had been tried before a British military tribunal. These were the first of numerous trials of Nazi war criminals and related criminal and civil proceedings arising out of the Holocaust. This seminar will examine legal and ethical issues raised in these and other trials of Nazi war criminals and individuals accused of collaborating with the Nazis in perpetrating crimes against humanity, including the 1947 Justice Trial of Nazi judges and senior officials of the Third Reich Ministry of Justice, the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem and the 1963-64 Tel Aviv trial of Hersz Barenblat, the head of the Jewish police in the ghetto of Bedzin, Poland. The course will also examine the history of the Genocide Convention, and the developing law of genocide and crimes against humanity with respect to atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Darfur, including the evolving law on rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war.