NCJ Number
164235
Journal
Criminal Law Forum Volume: 7 Issue: 1 Dated: (1996) Pages: 1-13
Date Published
1996
Length
13 pages
Annotation
The role of international criminal tribunals in dealing with war criminals and violators of international humanitarian law is examined, with emphasis on ad hoc tribunals established for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the case involving Dusko Tadic.
Abstract
The war crimes trials in Tokyo and Nuremberg following World War II processed only 28 and 22 defendants, respectively; the British war crimes trials held in southeast Asia between 1948 and 1948 prosecuted 890 individuals, of whom 220 were executed and more than 530 were sentenced to prison. The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has received its first guilty plea and has begun its first trial, that of Dusko Tadic. It is not clear whether that court will become trivialized as it spends months on the trial of this reprehensible but minor actor. Obtaining custody of the accused in both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda has been much more difficult than the experiences of 1945. The Tadic case has included an appellate decision o the legality of the creation of the tribunal and on its subject-matter jurisdiction, a trial decision on the protection of victims and witnesses, and a friend-of-the-court brief on the same topic. In addition, several books focus on issues related to the use of international criminal courts. Footnotes