Hello, I’m Zhan Qingyun.

We have described the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials as great judicial undertakings in human history. For the first time, individuals were made to pay for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and individual wrongdoing was judged through law.

After those trials, many international criminal-law treaties and other international instruments likewise began to recognize individuals as subjects capable of committing international crimes.

International law is a system centered on sovereign states. China, for example, normally joins international treaties in its capacity as a sovereign state.

Only after Nuremberg and Tokyo did people begin to recognize that not just sovereign states, but individuals within them, should bear personal criminal responsibility for their acts. International law then incorporated this idea into a range of conventions.

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, for example, provides that persons committing genocide shall be punished whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals.

When the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia began trying individuals for genocide committed during Yugoslavia’s breakup, it could rely on the earlier 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1948 Genocide Convention as legal foundations.

Likewise, the 1945 Charter of the International Military Tribunal for Europe first classified crimes against humanity as punishable offenses under international law.

In 1954, the United Nations produced the Draft Code of Offences against the Peace and Security of Mankind, offering a clearer account of what constitutes a crime against humanity.

War crimes, too, received an initial definition in the London Charter, and the international community reaffirmed those concepts in the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

In other words, Nuremberg and Tokyo were imperfect, but they opened the door to a wave of development in international and international criminal law. For the first time, the world seriously considered using law to punish individuals for exceptionally grave conduct such as war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The international community could act collectively, without depending solely on the offender’s home state under the nationality principle or the place of the crime under the territorial principle.