Nuremberg hasn’t meant justice for Iraq, Gaza…

Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring in Nuremberg, the 2025 film

Ahead of the 80th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trials, the new eponymous film should be a reminder of how partial and incomplete is our system of international justice.

As Tim Townsend, author of the acclaimed book Mission at Nuremberg, recently pointed out, America always had doubts about instituting a system to dispense international justice. (Click here for my blog: Nuremberg has not become a byword for international justice).

Mr Townsend notes in the Financial Times (paywall) that while “American legal minds conceived of the structure and principles of the Nuremberg trials”, the US still did not sign the 1998 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Even at the time the Nuremberg trials were being conceived, American lawyers were wondering if it would commit the US and other western nations to something they might regret. Mr Townsend cites the debate among President Roosevelt’s war secretary, Henry Stimson, assistant war secretary John McCloy and Lt Col Murray Bernays of the Army General Staff over how to define war crimes. Bernays pointed out that “the US government’s prosecution of Germans for their atrocities against Jews ‘would invite investigations and complaints by other nations of the treatment of Negroes in the United States, Indians by Great Britain, etc’.”

Well, that hasn’t happened.

Nor has justice been served to countless people around the world. Just ask Iraq, Libya, Gaza…

The FT’s Edward Luce offers a reasonable response to Mr Townsend: “I can understand why the US and Israel voted in 1998 against the Rome Statute, though they were in telling company; the others were China, Iraq, Libya, Qatar and Yemen… A crime is a crime regardless of who commits it”.

Quite so.

A crime is a crime regardless of who commits it, except when they are more politically and economically powerful than the rest.