International Criminal Law at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The judgments handed down at Nuremberg and Tokyo in the aftermath of the Second World War are generally positioned as international criminal law’s ‘Groatian moment’ and have received widespread attention from historians, international lawyers, activists and students of international relations. Surprisingly, the precedents to these proceedings remain comparatively understudied. In this paper the authors aim to uncover two significant but neglected caesurae in the history of international criminal law. The first, covered in Part I, are prosecutions carried out by the Great Powers against individuals for their role in inter-communal violence between Christians and Muslims on Crete in September 1898. In Part II the authors examine the International Commission at Paoting-Fu, established in 1900 for the purpose of identifying and punishing Boxers ringleaders accused of the massacre of Western Christians in turn-of-the-century China. In these sections the authors describe the origins of the prosecutorial imperative, the operations of the courts, the reaction to their verdicts and their basis in contemporary international law. Finally, in Part III, the authors trace the influence of these seminal and revolutionary experiments with individual accountability for war crimes, crimes against humanity and arguably even what we today call ‘genocide’ on later efforts to institute international criminal proceedings against the Kaiser in the wake of the First World War.