In the Shadow of the Paris Peace Conference: Behind the Scene of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East

Babovic, Aleksandra

doi:10.1007/978-981-13-3477-1_2

Aleksandra Babovic⁵

Part of the book series: New Directions in East Asian History ((NDEAH))

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Abstract

This chapter shows the rise of preeminence of the international law in the first decade of the twentieth century and in what way it is important for advancing foreign policy of the Great Powers at that time, with focus on the US and Japan. Babovic shows the nexus between the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference and subsequent institutional and contractual instruments adopted in the interwar period to limit war. The chapter focuses on the contested idea that war is an illegal and a criminal act upon which the new post-World War II international order is established and its relation with IMT Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunal.

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Notes

1.
Ignacio de la Rasilla, “A Very Short History of International Law Journals, 1869–2018,” European Journal of International Law 29:1, 2018, 143.
2.
Ibid., 142.
3.
Oona Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalist: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, New York: Simon&Shuster, 2017, 57–58.
4.
Ibid., 142. See Yasuaki Onuma, “Japanese International Law in the Prewar Period: Perspectives on Teaching and Research of International Law in the Prewar Japan,” Japanese Annual of International Law 29 (1986).
5.
Ignacio de la Rasilla, “A Very Short History of International Law Journals, 1869–2018,”143.
6.
Francis A. Boyle, Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations, 1898–1922 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) Cited in Ignacio de la Rasilla, “A Very Short History of International Law Journals, 1869–2018,”146.
7.
Boyle, Foundations of World Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations, 1898–1922, 136.
8.
Ibid., 17.
9.
Benjamin A. Coates, Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 152.
10.
Tosh Minohara, Tze-ki Hon, and Evan Dawley, eds., The Decade of Great War: Japan and the Wider World in the 1910s (Leiden: Brill Academic Pub, 2014), ix.
11.
Ibid., 3.
12.
Ibid., 63.
13.
Ibid.
14.
Ibid., ix.
15.
Ibid., 65.
16.
Tosh Minohara, ed., The History of US-Japan Relations: From Perry to the Present (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 54–57.
17.
Ibid., 84–85.
18.
Ibid.
19.
Ibid., 87.
20.
Ibid., 88.
21.
Ibid., 79.
22.
Ibid.
23.
Coates, Legalist Empire, 152.
24.
Stephen Wertheim, “The League That Wasn’t: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914-1920,” Diplomatic History, Vol 35. No 5 (November 2011), 797–836.
25.
Kirsten Sellars, Crimes Against Peace and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3.
26.
Violation of the Laws and Customs of War. Reports of Majority and Dissenting Reports of American and Japanese Members of the Commission of Responsibilities. Conference of Paris 1919. (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1919.
27.
Ibid.
28.
Cherif M. Bassiouni, “From Versailles to Rwanda in Seventy-Five Years: The Need to Establish a Permanent International Criminal Court,” Harvard Human Rights Law Review 10 (1997): 19.
29.
Ibid.; Jonathan G. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 105.
30.
Violations of the Laws and Customs of War: Report of Majority and Dissenting Reports of American and Japanese Members of the Commission of Responsibilities, Conference of Paris, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919).
31.
Ibid.,
32.
Ibid., 72.
33.
Ibid., 75–76.
34.
Julius Stone, Aggression and World Order: A Critique of United Nations Theories of Aggression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 39–40.
35.
Coates, Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century, 165.
36.
Ibid., 166.
37.
Sellars, ‘Crimes against Peace’ and International Law, 19.
38.
Ibid.
39.
Ibid., 23.
40.
Ibid., 25.
41.
Ibid., 33.
42.
Tosh Minohara, ed., The History of US-Japan Relations: From Perry to Present (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 87
43.
Ibid., 59.
44.
Sellars, ‘Crimes against Peace’ and International Law, 43.
45.
Jonathan Garry Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, 2.
46.
Aleksandra Babovic, “Justice on Trial: The Establishment of International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1945–1946,” (master’s thesis, Kobe University, 2015), 20.
47.
Memorandum by the British Lord Chancellor Simon, London, September 4, 1944. FRUS, 1944. Conference at Quebec, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1972, 92.
48.
Prime Minister Churchill to President Roosevelt, Telegram, London, October 22, 1944. FRUS 1945. Conferences at Malta and Yalta, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1955, 400.
49.
Higurashi Yoshinobu, Tōkyō saiban no kokusai kankei: kokusai seiji ni okeru kenryōku to kihan, Tokyo: Bokutakusha, 2002, 79.
50.
Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948, xxii.
51.
Ibid., 585–586.
52.
Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance, 157.
53.
Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, 122–123.
54.
Term used to designate the use of law to regulate war.
55.
Ibid.
56.
Frederick S. Dunn, Peace Making and the Settlement with Japan (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1963), 9–11.
57.
For more details on the negotiations leading to the IMT Charter, see Sellars, ‘Crimes Against Peace’ and International Law, 84–112; London Conference, Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States representative, to the international conference on military trials (Washington: Department of State, 1949).
58.
Ibid., 5.
59.
The Assistant Secretary (McCloy) to the Secretary of State, Memorandum of Conference of the Secretary of State, July 26, 1945, FRUS, The Conference in Berlin (The Potsdam Conference), Washington: Government Printing Office, 1960, 423.
60.
Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2008), 21.
61.
Justice Jackson’s Report to President on Atrocities and War Crimes, June 7, 1945. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/imt_jack01.asp (accessed on March 13, 2016).
62.
Ibid.
63.
Ibid.
64.
Sellars, ‘Crimes Against Peace’ and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 88–89.
65.
Ibid., 44. Jackson defended the interpretation of “qualified neutrality” in the light of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty—aggressive wars made the traditional postulates of neutrality doctrine, that is, unquestionable absolute neutrality of states in any instance of war, inadmissible as the signatory states had the duty to militarily attack the aggressor.
66.
Ibid.
67.
Ibid.

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Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
Aleksandra Babovic

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Babovic, A. (2019). In the Shadow of the Paris Peace Conference: Behind the Scene of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. In: The Tokyo Trial, Justice, and the Postwar International Order. New Directions in East Asian History. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3477-1_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3477-1_2
Published: 05 January 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-13-3476-4
Online ISBN: 978-981-13-3477-1
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