NEW YORK -- On Aug. 2, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted Bosnian Serb Gen. Radislav Krstic of genocide. But even before the verdict, the Bush administration had made clear its opposition to the effort to create an International Criminal Court, which would broaden the scope of jurisdiction from specific to universal. As the July 13 New York Times dispatch from the United Nations put it, the Bush administration may even "work actively to reverse international support" for the court.
Richard Minear's "Victor's Justice," the third printing of which the University of Michigan Press has recently issued, may throw some light on the apparently unjustifiable U.S. position. The book was "the only monographic treatment in Western languages" of the Tokyo Trial when Princeton University Press published it in 1971. It retains its almost exclusive importance today.
For those who think of the Tokyo Trial mainly as just another indicator of Japan's "inability to come to terms with its wartime past," the one great surprise may be that international law at the time was too shaky for the types of crimes that the Big Four decided to prosecute. While working for what would become the London Agreement, in August 1945, Britain, for one, expressed the view that many of the actions targeted for punishment "are not war crimes in the ordinary sense, nor is it at all clear that they can properly be described as crimes under international law."