The Immunity of State Officials from Foreign Criminal Jurisdiction: Lessons from the United Nations War Crimes Commission
This project explores whether contemporary international law scholarship and practice can learn useful lessons from the pioneering work of the United Nations War Crimes Commission.
The project analyses the previously classified archives of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), a body of world leading legal experts that assisted Allied States in the 1940s to bring thousands of prosecutions against Axis personnel for their role in atrocity crimes perpetrated during WWII and the Holocaust.
In particular, the project considers the Commission's finding that States could bring prosecutions in their domestic courts against foreign officials at all levels of seniority, including heads of State, heads of government, and foreign ministers, and the Commission's subsequent endorsement of significant State practice of bringing such national prosecutions, including multiple indictments of Adolf Hitler.
At a time of great tension between calls for accountability for international crimes on the one hand, and immunities accorded to foreign officials on the other, this project asks two key questions:
- Does the expert opinion and practice of the UNWCC and its 17 Member States support the exclusion of immunity with respect to international crimes?
- Does the UNWCC provide a model that could be used to lend international legitimacy to national prosecutions today?
