Title
“Speaking about the Destruction of the Armenians”: Early Failures in International Criminal Justice and Lessons for Today
Abstract
The first serious international attempt to hold individuals criminally accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, or waging aggressive war took place in the aftermath of World War I. Proposals to hold trials for leaders and others in Germany and Turkey had many advocates, but there were also strong countercurrents of opposition. The United States, in particular, opposed any international efforts to try these persons. In the end, the Allies made only a half-hearted attempt to hold international trials, and most of the perpetrators of these crimes escaped criminal justice. In the years after this failure, Nazi Germany undertook a catastrophic campaign of aggression and slaughter. While it is impossible to know fully the degree to which the failure to hold individuals accountable after World War I contributed to these subsequent events, there were numerous links between the Nazis and the World War I-era crimes. In particular, Hitler noted the failure to punish the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, asking “Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?” After World War II, the United States sought to avoid the mistakes of the past and persuaded the Allies to hold the Nuremberg trials, which are still regarded as a triumph in international criminal law and a highlight of U.S. foreign policy. While the final verdict on the deterrence value of international trials is still out, lessons from both the international and domestic field indicate that these trials may have a strong deterrent effect, and that it will be stronger the more standardized and certain the trials become. Thus the current U.S. attitude toward international courts, particularly toward the International Criminal Court, is dangerous in its similarity to that of the Post-World War I period, and we ignore the lessons from this era at our peril.
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