The trials began 63 years ago yesterday. The groundbreaking trials were a revolution in international criminal law, setting forth the principle that legalizing vicious abuses such as crimes against humanity under domestic law could not provide impunity. Rather, such abuses always violated international law.
When the Khmer leaders or the interhamwe or Charles Taylor or Slobodan Milosevic or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are tried, our system for bringing them to justice – and our legal right to do so – owes a great to debt to Justice Robert Jackson and the other allied prosecutors and judges.
