ABSTRACT
Scholars have pointed to a number of historical trials that might serve as precursors to modern international criminal law. These include the von Hagenbach Trial in 1474 or the Mixed French-Siamese Arbitral Tribunal in 1893-94. The Soviet-era show trials, themselves, continued into the 1950s, most famously in Prague where the purpose was not to determine guilt or innocence, nor, even, to remove political opponents but rather to create them. Francois de Menthon, one of the French Prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1945, was assigned the task of defining humanity. The context was a trial in which a more or less new legal category, crimes against humanity, had to be created to encompass the system of abuse and murder instituted by the Nazis in the mid-1930s. Jewish groups in Lyon believed that the trial would provide some reckoning for Klaus Barbie's micro-Holocaust at Izieu. Crimes against humanity are violent acts committed by enemies of mankind in concrete circumstances.
