Introduction

In 1945, the Allies, on the initiative of the United States, established the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of Major German War Criminals (the Nuremberg Tribunal) to prosecute and punish top leaders of Nazi Germany for war crimes conducted during the Second World War. Almost half a century later, the United Nations, with the United States again playing a leading role, created the ad hoc international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTs). The ICTs, both in their creation and operation, are strongly based on and influenced by the experience of the Nuremberg Tribunal and postwar Germany and ‘lessons’ learned from it. The historical, legal and political precedent of the ‘Nuremberg legacy’ was explicitly invoked with the creation of the ICTs and subsequent discourse surrounding their expected impacts. At the opening of the commemoration of ‘50 years after Nuremberg’ in October 1995, US President Bill Clinton declared: ‘We have an obligation to carry forward the lessons of Nuremberg. That is why we strongly support the United Nations War Crimes Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda’.1