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| Dr. Francine Hirsch |
On March 8, the European Union Center had the privilege of hosting Dr. Francine Hirsch (Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) for an afternoon of virtual discussion on the atrocities being committed by Russia in Ukraine. Dr. Hirsch’s presentation highlighted what may be the most promising option to solidify Putin’s legacy of devastation and eventually see the war’s principal actors duly punished for their crimes: the creation of a special tribunal – potentially on the Nuremberg model – to try Russia’s leaders for their deplorable crimes in Ukraine.
While there is admittedly very little chance of Putin or any of his coterie of oligarchs, military leaders, and propagandists willingly submitting to the will of any such tribunal, in citing the Washington Post, Dr. Hirsch emphasized that it would be “unconscionable to fail to establish a formal mechanism” to hold the individuals responsible for the war accountable for their actions. This mechanism, she and many others in the international community suggest, could be very effectively based on a Nuremberg-style model.
In pondering the validity of such a model’s utilization in pursuit of the rectification of the heinous crimes being committed by Russian actors in Ukraine, it’s vital to understand its implications. The discussion’s title itself references the Nuremberg trials, which referred to Germany’s actions in World War II as “crimes against peace." This thus begs the questions of what are crimes against peace, and why is there an important distinction crimes against peace and, for example, war crimes or crimes against humanity. In short, it is because the concept of "crimes against peace" is not simply a rephrasing of war crimes but rather refers to something else entirely.
Dr. Hirsch noted that in the Nuremberg trials, it was argued that the Nazi regime and its many collaborators should be charged not only for war crimes, which, as Dr. Hirsch said, are “violations of the laws and customs of war that had been codified” into international law, but also for initiating the war in the first place. Crimes against peace thus refers not to any specific violation of a specific international convention so much as the destruction of a period of relative peace between the world's nations. In light of that comparison, it’s not difficult to draw parallels between then and now, with the world having been in a similarly peaceful period devoid of interstate war before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Yet, for a Nuremberg-style tribunal to be created and successfully implemented, it would need widespread international support, even beyond what we are currently seeing. At the end of the presentation, Dr. Hirsch offered the audience an important question to think on. “Where is our public conscience at for war crimes to be punished for our international legal system? To work, states must be willing to get behind international principles, to join international institutions, and to pursue enforcement. States, even large and powerful ones, must be willing to seed some degrees of sovereignty... we’ll need, dare I say, a new Nuremberg moment.”
The recording of Dr. Hirsch's talk can be found here.
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