The London session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine. Flickr/Tribunal Russell. Some rights reserved.
After the second world war a legal and moral threshold was crossed. Leaders of Germany and Japan were held individually responsible for their contributions to state crimes committed by their governments in the course of the war. These trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo were heralded at the time as the start of a new era for the rule of law, which meant that political and military leaders could no longer benefit from impunity merely by covering their alleged criminality with a thick blanket of sovereignty, effectively placing their acts beyond legal scrutiny. From then on, it was naively supposed, there would be individual responsibility for political leaders and military commanders based on international criminal law, which was to be given precedence over any claims based on national sovereignty or the authority of domestic law.
There was just one problem with this apparent step forward. It was only the crimes of the defeated countries that were prosecuted, while the crimes of the victors were totally disregarded. This meant that no legal responsibility was ever formally proposed for those who ordered the terror bombings of German and Japanese cities, with the express design of demoralizing their civilian populations. Even more prominently, this denied responsibility for those who carried out the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, grossly indiscriminate with the overwhelming casualties and devastation associated with civilian society.
