Pilot for Dutch low cost carrier arrested: see why!

[Bitchkitten]

The Nuremberg trials got it wrong.

The Nuremberg trials are an example of an understandable and perfectly justified emotional desire for revenge getting in the way of every basic fundamental principle of justice.

It is absolutely unacceptable inflict judicial punishment upon someone for an act that was legal at the time it was committed. The potential consequences are just too dire.[/quote]

I disagree. If someone violates human rights, commits genocide, and also commits war crimes, there is no excuse. There is no defense by being able to say that "I was just following the orders of a", in NS terms, "psychotic dictator".[/quote]QFT
Legality is no excuse for atrocity. The people involved knew what they were doing was wrong, unless they fit the legal criteria for insanity, they need to be punished regardless of local law.

[Treznor]

I disagree. If someone violates human rights, commits genocide, and also commits war crimes, there is no excuse. There is no defense by being able to say that "I was just following the orders of a", in NS terms, "psychotic dictator".

History is written by the victors.

So are charges of war crimes.

Even when such charges are justified (as they often are), the potential for politicization, arbitrary standards, lack of a fair trial, etc. that accompanies war crimes trials to a much greater degree than it does mundane criminal cases seems to mean that the injunction against applying laws retroactively should be adhered to even more stringently in the case of allegations of war crimes than in everyday criminal trials.

History is also challenged frequently by those who study it. So far, few people have found reason to argue with labeling political or racial executions as war crimes when they study it. It's one of the reasons why Christianity has found its fortunes falling in recent years as people went back through historical records and found the "purges" and missionary missions that resulted in the deaths of entire cultures and belief systems to be not quite as justified as was originally claimed.

[Gift-of-god]

Was what he specifically did against Argentine law at the time he did it?

Legality is irrelevant to morality, of course; but it's a bad day when people can be processed through the legal system for acts that were legal at the time they were committed.

Obviously, it was against the law, or they wouldn't have been covering it up all this time. I doubt that the constitution of Argentina at the time allowed for the state to arbitrarily execute people who were not sentenced to death.

[Cybach]

The Nuremberg trials got it wrong.

The Nuremberg trials are an example of an understandable and perfectly justified emotional desire for revenge getting in the way of every basic fundamental principle of justice.

It is absolutely unacceptable inflict judicial punishment upon someone for an act that was legal at the time it was committed. The potential consequences are just too dire.

I disagree. If someone violates human rights, commits genocide, and also commits war crimes, there is no excuse. There is no defense by being able to say that "I was just following the orders of a", in NS terms, "psychotic dictator".[/quote]QFT
Legality is no excuse for atrocity. The people involved knew what they were doing was wrong, unless they fit the legal criteria for insanity, they need to be punished regardless of local law.[/quote]



So you are an advocate for Ex post facto law, i.e retro-active? Since the actions by the Germans at the time can be very successfully argued to have been legal at the time.

However even ignoring that. You also support how the Nuremberg trial simply;

+ The defendants were not allowed to appeal or affect the selection of judges. A. L. Goodhart, Professor at Oxford, opposed the view that, because the judges were appointed by the victors, the Tribunal was not impartial and could not be regarded as a court in the true sense.

+ Not allowed to protest that the main Soviet judge, Nikitchenko, had taken part in Stalin's show trials of 1936–1938

+ Protest that one of the charges, brought against Keitel, Jodl, and Ribbentrop included conspiracy to commit aggression against Poland in 1939. The Secret Protocols of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939, proposed the partition of Poland between the Germans and the Soviets (which was subsequently executed in September 1939); however, Soviet leaders were not tried for being part of the same conspiracy.

+ The London Charter definition of what constituted a crime against humanity was unknown when many of the crimes were committed, it could be argued to be a retrospective law, in violation of the principles of prohibition of ex post facto laws and violating the general principle of penal law nullum crimen, nulla poena sine praevia lege poenali.

+ The court agreed to relieve the Soviet leadership from attending these trials as war criminals in order to hide their crimes against war civilians, crimes that were committed by their army that included "carving up Poland in 1939 and attacking Finland three months later." This "exclusion request" was initiated by the Russians and subsequently approved by the court's administration.

+ The trials were conducted under their own rules of evidence; the indictments were created ex post facto and were not based on any nation's law; the tu quoque defense was removed; and some claim the entire spirit of the assembly was "victor's justice". The Charter of the International Military Tribunal permitted the use of normally inadmissible "evidence". Article 19 specified that "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence... and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value".

+ The chief Soviet prosecutor submitted false documentation in an attempt to indict defendants for the murder of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. However, the other Allied prosecutors refused to support the indictment and German lawyers promised to mount an embarrassing defense. No one was charged or found guilty at Nuremberg for the Katyn Forest massacre.

+Freda Utley, in her 1949 book "The High Cost of Vengeance" charged the court with amongst other things double standards. She pointed to the Allied use of civilian forced labor, and deliberate starvation of civiliansin the occupied territories. She also noted that General Rudenko, the chief Soviet prosecutor, after the trials became commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (After the fall of East Germany the bodies of 12,500 Soviet era victims were uncovered at the camp, mainly "children, adolescents and elderly people.")

+ Some treaties were not binding on the Axis powers because they were not signatories. This was addressed in the judgment relating to war crimes and crimes against humanity contains an expansion of customary law "the Convention Hague 1907 expressly stated that it was an attempt 'to revise the general laws and customs of war,' which it thus recognised to be then existing, but by 1939 these rules laid down in the Convention were recognised by all civilised nations, and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war which are referred to in Article 6 (b) of the [London] Charter." The implication under international law is that if enough countries have signed up to a treaty, and that treaty has been in effect for a reasonable period of time, then it can be interpreted as binding on all nations not just those who signed the original treaty. This is a highly controversial aspect of international law, one that is still actively debated in international legal journals. Which effectivelly means that the Germans did not sign a treaty, were not a signatory to it. But the court decided they still had to be a party to it, because "enough other nations had signed it."







So while the execution of high ranking Nazis was all good and fine. Please allow me to snort in anyone's face who tries to sell that farce which was Nuremburg as justice. It was a perversion of Law, with which any self-respecting lawyer would be highly embarrassed and ashamed of. If you have to kill them, just kill the men. Don't instigate a show trial, bending most of the Laws or outright breaking some. Then try to sell it as legal justice. Perhaps it was moral justice. But Nuremberg was a legal injustice, which is a black mark on the judicial history of the US. It was Victors Justice through and through. And there was nothing bad about that, some of those men did terrible things for which they deserved death. However they were not handed down death in a legal form, or in a just fashion. They were put up in a mockery of a trial, which perverted the legal aspects of just about every international law.

[JarVik]

thats interesting... its bizare it took them so long to find him, or have the Argentinians only started looking for these people rcently?

My dim understanding of events is that the people responsible have mostly gotten away with it. With a few trials now and then, but you don't disappear thousands of people without alot of guilty hands and handlers of the guilty hands.

[Glorious Freedonia]

What do you get when you cross an Argentinian and a Chilean?

[JarVik]

What do you get when you cross an Argentinian and a Chilean?

what?

[Lackadaisical2]

What do you get when you cross an Argentinian and a Chilean?

way to leave us hanging, now I'm going to be thinking about this all day.