Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

42 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:27
was hanged. While the trial was a purely national undertaking, the court
adhered to the principles and precedents of the IMT, but like trials before
and since, it broadened the scope of crimes against humanity. The Eichmann
trial is comparable to the IMT in the full historical record it compiled,
adhering to standard rules of evidence and procedure and providing documentary
material for later trials as well as historians. 22
Two ad hoc tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda (ICTR) were created respectively in 1993 and 1994 by the UN
Security Council under Chapter VII of the charter, empowering it to preserve
or restore “international peace and security.” They too set important
precedents. The civil war and ethnic persecution that punctuated the disintegration
of Yugoslavia had a vivid impact on the West. The scale of the
atrocities and their visibility on nightly TV reporting “death camps” ringed
about with barbed wire and “ethnic cleansing” that laid out rows of corpses,
and the fact that the barbarity went on in Europe within living memory of
the horrors of World War II, brought the Holocaust once more powerfully
to mind and galvanized world opinion to take forceful action. The ICTY
trials—pursuing indictments for crimes against humanity, war crimes,
genocide, and aggression—refined the definition of genocide with regard to
“intent”; because demonstrating proof of motive or intent is extremely difficult,
and ICTY failed in some instances, in appeal proceedings it created a
lesser but still very serious charge of “aiding and abetting” genocide. That
refinement enabled the court to avert the imbroglio of intent and to convict
rather than release the accused for insufficient evidence. Also part of
ICTY’s jurisprudence was its decision that ethnic cleansing, together with
additional evidence, could suffice to establish genocidal intent. Signaling
the advance since IMT’s breakthroughs half a century earlier, ICTR was
empowered by its statute to prosecute genocide, conspiracy to commit
genocide, incitement to commit genocide, attempting to commit genocide,
and complicity in genocide. Its conviction of the prime minister of Rwanda,
Jean Kambanda, made him the first (former) head of state to be found guilty
of genocide. In its media case, ICTR convicted leading journalists, editors,
and TV moguls of incitement to genocide—the first time since Julius
22. Matthew Lippman, “Genocide: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann and the Quest
for Global Justice,” Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, 8 (2002): 45-121; Lawrence
Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of
the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 97-182. For several
other pivotal trials—such as of Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier, and Maurice Papon, all
in France, and of Imre Finta in Canada—which are more national in significance,
see Frederick M. Schweitzer, chapter on international law, in North American
Antisemitism, Brill, in preparation.