ABSTRACT
As diplomats were labouring in San Francisco to create the United Nations in 1945, a parallel exercise was underway in London to establish the first international tribunal for the prosecution of serious violations of international law. The institution that resulted, the International Military Tribunal, which sat in Nuremberg and tried several of the Nazi leaders, was a creation of the four ‘great’ powers, and was independent of the United Nations. Nevertheless, the principles established at Nuremberg were endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly at its first session, in December 1946.1 Only a few weeks earlier, the Tribunal had completed its work with the execution by hanging of eleven leading Nazis.2 Although the General Assembly of the United Nations did not then speak specifically to the use of capital punishment for the punishment of Nazi war criminals, the matter was, at the time, entirely uncontroversial. A report on the death penalty prepared by the Secretariat of the United Nations more than thirty years later noted that ‘the post-war years were not conducive to allowing Member States to come to an unequivocal position on the issue. Some countries with a long abolitionist tradition argued for barring the death penalty during times of war, while other members proposed an exception for offenders guilty of crimes against mankind’.3
