Andrey Petrov on Vesti.FM: truly fair international court should be independent from politics

The world is at the beginning of a journey towards a truly fair international court, only one step further ahead of the Nuremberg attempt, a senior analyst of Vestnik Kavkaza Andrey Petrov said in the Natsvopros program on Vesti.FM.

Natsvopros is a weekly program on Vesti.FM, during which various aspects of national relations in Russia and the CIS countries are discussed. Today's program was dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials.

"I would like to draw your attention to some of the lessons of the Nuremberg Trials that have remained unlearned even now. Although for international law it was one of the most important, if not the most important event of the 20th century, it also revealed problems in the further enforcement of laws and regulations at the international level, " the Vestnik Kavkaza senior analyst said.

"Firstly, the Nuremberg trial showed that - with all the desire for a different outcome - it is impossible to separate politics from the international court. Any trial over a state will always be an arena for a clash of other countries’ political interests. Although in 1945-1946, there was solidarity among states, each country tried to benefit from the process: the United States needed to avoid responsibility for the bombing of Dresden and especially the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, France sought to divert attention from the collaboration issues, Great Britain wanted to erase the memory of the British-German cooperation during the pre-war period, " the expert explained.

“All together they moved to a new confrontation, this time against the Soviet Union. It was the Nuremberg trials that marked the beginning of the Cold War. It was the Soviet evidence of Nazi atrocities that served as the turning point proving the Reich’s crimes against humanity (Western prosecutors, for example, could not believe that children were shot in concentration camps). Although it was obvious to everyone that the Soviet people suffered the most during World War II, this did not prevent Western countries from creating a coalition against the USSR right in the courtroom,” Andrey Petrov noted.

"The second sad outcome of the Nuremberg trials, by the way, is quite paradoxical -  those who want to arrange a new genocide learned a lot. Why, despite the need to create perfect new international legislation and retroactively apply it to the Nazi war crimes, the prosecution did not experience any problems with evidence? Because the Nazis themselves, as pedantic German people, drew up many documents about the Holocaust. The prosecution, in fact, did not need to prove anything - all reports on mass killings on ethnic grounds and explanations were written by the criminals themselves,” Andrey Petrov said.

"What lesson did nationalists all over the world learn and apply? Not that it is impossible to kill people on any grounds and punishment will certainly come for this, no. Future organizers of ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Argentina, looking back at the Nuremberg trials, made sure that no documents that could be used against them in court were preserved "

“This, in my opinion, indicates that we are only at the beginning of the road, one step away from the first attempt to create a truly fair international court that was made in Nuremberg. The International Court of Justice should be 100% independent of political interests, otherwise, it degenerates into another geopolitical game, where crime and punishment only serve as a background,” Andrey Petrov concluded.