Thursday, May 5, 2011

Sellars on "William Patrick and 'Crimes Against Peace' at the Tokyo Tribunal"

Kirsten Sellars (independent scholar) has posted "William Patrick and ‘Crimes Against Peace’ at the Tokyo Tribunal, 1946-1948," which is forthcoming in the Edinburgh Law Review 15, No. 2 (2011): 166-196.

Here's the abstract:
After the Second World War, the victorious allies convened the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to punish Japan’s leaders for crimes against peace and other war-related crimes. The crimes against peace charge had proved controversial at the Nuremberg Tribunal, and the sponsoring powers made considerable efforts to ensure that the Tokyo judgment reinforced the Nuremberg determination. The scope and significance of these efforts has been largely unacknowledged, as has the central role in them of the British member of the court, William Patrick, a Senator of Scotland’s College of Justice. Patrick’s role demands closer examination because it proved crucial to the judgment at Tokyo. He campaigned for unalloyed support for the main tenets of the Nuremberg Judgment, and when that support was not forthcoming, helped to forge a majority faction to ensure that they were not abandoned. Finally, and most importantly, he insisted that crimes against peace and conspiracy to commit them were retained as the central elements of the majority’s judgment.
The full paper is available here.