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Nuremberg Principles

Page history last edited by David Gross 16 years ago

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

 

...

 

Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity... is a crime under international law.

 

Jaspers quote:

 

For the first time, and for all times to come, it is to make war a crime and to draw the conclusions… The undertaking may appear fantastic. But when the stakes become clear to us, the event makes us tremble with hope…

 

…The essential point is whether the Nuremberg trial comes to be a link in a chain of meaningful, constructive political acts (however often these may be frustrated by error, unreason, heartlessness and hate) or whether, by the yardstick there applied to mankind, the very powers now erecting it will in the end be found wanting…

 

It will either create confidence in the world that right was done and a foundation laid in Nuremberg.… Or disappointment by untruthfulness will create an even worse world atmosphere breeding new wars; instead of a blessing, Nuremberg would become a factor of doom, and in the world’s eventual judgment the trial would have been a sham and a mock trial. This must not happen.

 

http://sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=24May06

 

Jackson certainly seemed to have this in mind.  He thought that the international law he was helping to invent in Nuremberg “represents mankind’s desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world’s peace” and said “let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.”

 

  • Larry Rosenwald points to the Nuremberg Principles to explain his tax resistance.

 

See also: legal complicity, responsibility, Karl Jaspers

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