Applying the Death Penalty to Crimes of Genocide

Abstract

After the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the United Nations Security Council moved quickly to establish an international tribunal to indict the architects of the slaughter. Whether motivated by a sincere desire for international justice or a self-serving desire to assuage international guilt for the lack of significant military intervention, one thing is clear: the Security Council began a program that, when coupled with its establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, represented the most significant return to international criminal justice since the Allied prosecution of German war criminals at Nuremberg. But so much had changed since 1951. Whereas the Nuremberg Tribunal imposed death sentences for the most culpable instigators of the Holocaust, there would be no death sentences for the architects of the Hutu genocidal campaign against the Tutsi. Over the course of forty years, there was a sea shift in attitudes about the legality of the death penalty. When the Allies announced their decision to apply the death penalty at Nuremberg, few objected or suggested that executions would violate international human rights law. Indeed, Churchill was initially suspicious of the plan for a war crimes tribunal, having assumed that what remained of the Nazi leadership would simply be executed on the battlefield. As the proceedings unfolded, there were isolated calls for leniency and clemency, and even complaints of victors’ justice, but certainly no suggestion that executions violated international law as such.