Following World War II, the American Military Tribunal indicted twenty-three Nazi doctors and administrators for performing agonizing and often fatal experiments on helpless concentration camp inmates. Using primarily court records, this book attempts to answer the following salient questions: What sort of medical experiments did the Nazi doctors perform? Who were their victims, and what was their fate? What, if any, were the medical results? What legal charges were brought against the doctors, and what was their defense? Who were the witnesses? Did the defendants try to reconcile their brutal acts with the Hippocratic Code never to do harm, or were they devoid of any medical ethics? Did they constitute dishonorable exceptions to a principled German medical profession, or were they symptomatic of a more widespread disregard for traditional medical ethics? In trying to answer these questions, Horst H. Freyhofer gives the reader the opportunity to follow the exchanges between prosecutors and defendants as well as the final reasoning of the court.
In this edited collection, Theodor Meron, the world's most important author on issues of international humanitarian law, brings together a fascinating collection of his essays on war crimes and related areas, together with a new concluding chapter, from which the book takes its title, which brings together the themes explored in the essays. The rapid and fundamental developments in the last few years on the establishment of individual criminal responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian law have been such that now more than ever is an appropriate time to assess their principal features. This book will be welcomed by all scholars in the field as a useful and significant contribution to our understanding of international humanitarian law.
This collection is based on a lecture series organized jointly by Matrix Chambers and the Wiener Library in London between April and June 2002. Leading experts present papers examining the evolution of international criminal justice from its origins at Nuremberg through to the proliferation of international courts and tribunals based at The Hague today. The lectures will provide various perspectives on the subject for anyone interested in international criminal law--from specialists to non-specialists.
The provisions of the 1948 Genocide Convention are now being interpreted in important judgments by the International Court of Justice, the ad hoc Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and increasingly in domestic courts. In this definitive work William A. Schabas gives detailed attention to the concept of protected groups, the quantitative dimension of genocide, problems of criminal prosecution, and issues of international judicial cooperations such as extradition. He explores the duty to prevent genocide, and the consequences this may have on the emerging law of humanitarian intervention.
Perhaps no drama catches the interest of the American public more than a spectacular trial. Even though the reporting of a crime may quickly diminish in news value, the trial lingers while drama builds. Although this has become seemingly more pronounced in recent years with the popularity of televised trials, public interest in criminal trials was just as high in 1735 when John Peter Zenger defended his right to free speech, or in 1893 when Lizzie Borden was tried for the murder of her father and stepmother. This book tells the stories of sixteen significant trials in American history and their media coverage, from the Zenger trial in 1735 to the O. J. Simpson trial in 1995. Each chapter relates the history of events leading up to the trial, the people involved, and how the crimes and subsequent trials were reported.