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The Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties was a commission established at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Its role was to examine the background of the First World War, and to investigate and recommend individuals for prosecution for committing war crimes.
During the First World War, the Allied governments had decided to try defeated leaders whom they considered responsible for violations of international law and the laws of war. For that purpose, it was decided to establish an expert committee to make recommendations to that effect. Following the conclusion of the Armistice in November 1918, preparations began. The defeated German government officially concurred with the initiative on grounds that:
A complete truthful account of the world conditions and of the negotiations among the powers in July 1914 and of the steps taken at that time by the several governments could and would go far toward demolishing the walls of hatred and misconstruction erected by the long war to separate the peoples. [1]
In addition, the German government proposed the establishment of a neutral committee of experts to study the matter. The Allied governments refused, claiming that:
they [the Allied governments] do not consider that the German proposal requires any reply as the responsibility of Germany for the war has been long ago incontestably proved. [2]
The commission was established at the conference plenary session of 25 January 1919, and consisted of representatives of the five major Allied powers – the US, the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan – with the addition of Belgium, Greece, Poland, Romania and Serbia (later: Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes). Its members were as follows: [3] [4] [5]
USA:
British Empire:
France:
Italy:
Japan:
Belgium:
Greece:
Poland:
Romania:
Serbia (later: Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes):
The Commission was divided into three sub-commissions as follows:
The Commission submitted its report on 29 March 1919. It concluded that blame for the war lay in the first instance with the governments of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and secondly with those of Bulgaria and Turkey. [6] It recommended the establishment of an additional commission for a more exhaustive study of the alleged crimes of the defeated powers. [7] It further recommended the establishment of an international tribunal for the prosecution of suspected war criminals, with no immunity from prosecution even for defeated heads of state. It recommended that the tribunal should consist of 22 judges, three from each of the five major powers and an additional six from other countries. [8] [ clarification needed ]
The US delegates submitted their own opinion on 4 April 1919, expressing their reservations on the report. They suggested refraining from prosecuting heads of state, and focusing instead on lower levels of the government and military. They also suggested that defeated leaders or commanders should not be charged with acts not considered criminal at the time of their commission, i.e. that rules of conduct should not be imposed retroactively. They also argued that there should not be a permanent international tribunal for war crimes, but that, following any future war, such a tribunal should be established by the governments of the nations directly affected. [9]
On the same day the US delegation submitted its minority opinion, the Japanese delegation submitted its own reservations. The Japanese delegation's main reservation was about the demand to indict heads of state for violations. [10]
The Commission's recommendations were not carried through at the time. The proposed international tribunal for war crimes was not established, because of the refusal of the German government to cooperate. Instead, a few German individuals accused of war crimes were tried in 1921 at the Leipzig War Crimes Trials by the German authorities themselves. However, the recommendations did bear fruit in the longer term. Following the Second World War, two international Allied tribunals were established in Nuremberg and Tokyo to try German and Japanese leaders accused of war crimes. The demand for a permanent tribunal for crimes against humanity continued even after those tribunals had been dissolved, leading eventually to the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002.
The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries across Europe and atrocities against their citizens in World War II.
The Treaty of Versailles was a peace treaty signed on 28 June 1919. As the most important treaty of World War I, it ended the state of war between Germany and most of the Allied Powers. It was signed in the Palace of Versailles, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to the war. The other Central Powers on the German side signed separate treaties. Although the armistice of 11 November 1918 ended the actual fighting, and agreed certain principles and conditions including the payment of reparations, it took six months of Allied negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. Germany was not allowed to participate in the negotiations before signing the treaty.
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
Crimes against humanity are certain serious crimes committed as part of a large-scale attack against civilians. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war and against a state's own nationals as well as foreign nationals. Together with war crimes, genocide, and the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity are one of the core crimes of international criminal law and, like other crimes against international law, have no temporal or jurisdictional limitations on prosecution.
The Paris Peace Conference was a set of formal and informal diplomatic meetings in 1919 and 1920 after the end of World War I, in which the victorious Allies set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers. Dominated by the leaders of Britain, France, the United States and Italy, the conference resulted in five treaties that rearranged the maps of Europe and parts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands, and also imposed financial penalties. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and the other losing nations were not given a voice in the deliberations; this later gave rise to political resentments that lasted for decades. The arrangements made by this conference are considered one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trial and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, was a military trial convened on 29 April 1946 to try leaders of the Empire of Japan for their crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity, leading up to and during the Second World War. The IMTFE was modeled after the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, Germany, which prosecuted the leaders of Nazi Germany for their war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity.
A war of aggression, sometimes also war of conquest, is a military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense, usually for territorial gain and subjugation, in contrast with the concept of a just war.
Article 231, often known as the "War Guilt" clause, was the opening article of the reparations section of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War between the German Empire and the Allied and Associated Powers. The article did not use the word guilt but it served as a legal basis under which Germany was to pay reparations for damages caused during the war.
Theodor Meron, is an American lawyer and judge. He served as a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (Mechanism). He served as President of the ICTY four times and inaugural President of the Mechanism for three terms (2012–19).
A crime of aggression or crime against peace is the planning, initiation, or execution of a large-scale and serious act of aggression using state military force. The definition and scope of the crime is controversial. The Rome Statute contains an exhaustive list of acts of aggression that can give rise to individual criminal responsibility, which include invasion, military occupation, annexation by the use of force, bombardment, and military blockade of ports. In general, committing an act of aggression is a leadership crime that can only be committed by those with the power to shape a state's policy of aggression, as opposed to those who discharge it.
The Istanbul trials of 1919–1920 were courts-martial of the Ottoman Empire that occurred soon after the Armistice of Mudros, in the aftermath of World War I.
After World War I, the effort to prosecute Ottoman war criminals was taken up by the Paris Peace Conference (1919) and ultimately included in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman government organized a series of courts martial in 1919–1920 to prosecute war criminals, but these failed on account of political pressure. The main effort by the Allied administration that occupied Constantinople fell short of establishing an international tribunal in Malta to try the so-called Malta exiles, Ottoman war criminals held as POWs by the British forces in Malta. In the end, no tribunals were held in Malta.
Impunity is the ability to act with exemption from punishments, losses, or other negative consequences. In the international law of human rights, impunity is failure to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice and, as such, itself constitutes a denial of the victims' right to justice and redress. Impunity is especially common in countries which lack the tradition of rule of law, or suffer from pervasive corruption, or contain entrenched systems of patronage, or where the judiciary is weak or members of the security forces are protected by special jurisdictions or immunities. Impunity is sometimes considered a form of denialism of historical crimes.
A war crimes trial is the trial of persons charged with criminal violation of the laws and customs of war and related principles of international law committed during armed conflict.
The Leipzig war crimes trials were held in 1921 to try alleged German war criminals of the First World War before the German Reichsgericht in Leipzig, as part of the penalties imposed on the German government under the Treaty of Versailles. Twelve people were tried, and the proceedings were widely regarded at the time as a failure. In the longer term, they were seen by some as a significant step toward the introduction of a comprehensive system for the prosecution of international law violations.
Mineichirō Adachi was a Japanese legal expert and President of the Permanent Court of International Justice at the Hague from 1931 until 1934.
Harukazu Nagaoka was a Japanese diplomat and jurist who served as member of the Japanese delegation to the Commission of Responsibilities at the Paris Peace Conference and represented Japan to the League of Nations. He also sat on a number of national and international judicial and arbitral positions, including as a judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice.
United Nations Security Council resolution 955, adopted on 8 November 1994, after recalling all resolutions on Rwanda, the Council noted that serious violations of international humanitarian law had taken place in the country and, acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).
The Štip massacre was the mass murder of Serbian soldiers by paramilitary forces of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) in the village of Ljuboten, Štip on 15 October 1915, during World War I. Sick and wounded Serbian soldiers, recuperating at the Štip town hospital, were detained by Macedonian IMRO militants before being taken into the vicinity of Ljuboten and killed. An estimated 118–120 Serbian soldiers were executed in the massacre.
The Bulgarian occupation of Serbia during World War I started in Autumn 1915 following the invasion of Serbia by the combined armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria. After Serbia's defeat and the retreat of its forces across Albania, the country was divided into Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian occupation zones.