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Recently in the CISD office, we’ve been looking through the minutes of the National Offices Conference. This was one of the key events in the history of the UNWCC – a summit bringing together representatives of all sixteen national offices that worked with the Commission in the Royal Courts of Justice, in May/June 1945, with the aim of coordinating and giving impetus to the unprecedented set of war crimes trials planned. You can see some footage of the NOC here and here, although in both cases, the sound track has been lost (if you know of any Movietone or British Pathe archives that might have intact sound, get in touch!).

One of the major occasions for the conference was the tide of the war. While the UNWCC had been founded back in 1943, when the outcome of the war was still not certain, by May 1945, much had changed. Concentration camps – and entire occupied countries – had been liberated, and a few weeks before the National Offices Conference met, VE day had been celebrated. The chairman of the Commission – Lord Wright – stated the new direction that the organisation would take:

‘The time had come when the mere collection of information must be changed into action, and action meant the trial of criminals and their conviction, sentence, and punishment where appropriate. To be effective, justice had to be expeditious. Punishment of the criminals would serve the double purpose of retribution to satisfy the people’s demand for justice and of warning and example to deter such crimes in future.’

A bold, blunt, statement of what the Commission sought to do, and why it sought to do it. While there are parts of its phrasing that sit uncomfortably with modern criminal justice – the idea of war crimes trials as ‘retribution’ has (at least in part) given way to a greater focus on justice and reconciliation, for example) – it nonetheless touches on many issues faced in international criminal justice today, such as the need for information gathering as a basis for action, and the importance of speedy, authoritative trial proceedings.

Despite its short length (only 97 A4 pages – fairly light compared to the thousands of pages of charge files we’ve been sifting through), it’s still a fairly dense document, and so we’re still working our way through it, chasing up the references it makes, and placing it in its historical context. Nonetheless, a few interesting issues relating to the participating countries have emerged.

The documents provide an interesting perspective on the growing independence of India, for example. While much of India’s participation in the Commission was closely linked with that of the UK, it’s particularly notable to observe the way that India is increasingly treated as an autonomous state throughout the Commission’s work, and how it’s acting as a state in its own right, a full two years before independence. We’re also looking into crimes against Indian troops, which largely took place in North Africa, and often seem to have involved particular singling out of Indian soldiers:

‘… So far as Indian cases are concerned, the majority of war crimes against Indian troops have been committed in the course of the campaigns in North Africa. Unfortunately the refusal of the Axis powers to allow the Protecting Power and the Red Cross to function in the North African war zone has cut off important channels of information. In consequence until the end of hostilities the best results cannot be expected.’

The NOC minutes also raise interesting questions about the USSR’s participation in postwar justice, and the links between its efforts and those of the UNWCC. The Soviet Union was not a UNWCC member, instead handling postwar criminal trials through its Extraordinary State Commission. Many members of the Conference bemoan this state of affairs, mentioning the mutual desire for cooperation and the ‘diplomatic reasons’ that foiled it, as well as their own efforts to maintain contact between the two Commissions. It will be interesting to trace these debates through the machinery and records of the early UN.

With the 70th anniversary of the NOC coming up, we’re also planning a series of events around the Conference, so watch this space!

Check out this op-ed by War Crimes Project Assistant Director Shanti Sattler and former International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia war crimes prosecutor Eliott Behar about the recent election of an all-female presidency at the International Criminal Court and the history of women in leadership roles in international criminal law, including women who represented their countries at the UNWCC.

This is a guest post by Ana-Carolina Sarmento, one of our project volunteers, about her experiences delving into the UNWCC archives.

There is one question every historian I have ever met has always asked me. How can one fully understand the present and wonder about the future, without ever looking back and contesting the past? The truth is that we seldom find the time to stop for a minute or two and think about the origins of many things in the world that we tend to take for granted.

One such origin that we often take for granted is that of the UN. From history books, political science articles, and even the odd undergrad essay done as part of the week spent studying political institutions, we often unknowingly repeat the big misconception that the United Nations was born in the aftermath of World War II. Through the ‘United Nations in the World’ course at SOAS, though, we’ve had a chance to examine the wartime origins of the UN and its important role in defeating the Axis Powers. The assessment of the processes by which this important organization came into existence shed light on many important issues regarding its role in the contemporary world. From the conferences that led to its creation, to the visions, expectations and hopes placed on the UN by colonial Western powers and their , and even the struggles of a handful of women in San Francisco to make the UN Charter even a little gender-inclusive back in 1945, we’ve learned how many of the issues we face today aren’t comprehensible from a presentist ‘last ten to twenty years’ approach, but go back far further, with their roots in old yellowing documents and archives describing near-forgotten conferences.

And then I learned that Nuremberg and Far East trials – often deemed as the first and most notable international tribunals, that were the sole predecessors in the to subsequent tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, actually had a predecessor themselves: the United Nations War Crimes Commission. This little-known UN agency operated with the goal of identifying, classifying, and making pre-trial assessments of alleged war criminals in Europe and Asia, and assisting national governments in prosecuting them. This wasn’t just the usual Britain, France, and America, either – a range of states including Yugoslavia (both royalist and communist), China, and a nascently independent India all took part. SOAS’ UNWCC Research Project is dedicated to the study of this organisation’s role in postwar justice, and to the promulgation of many of its archives, many of which have only been made public recently.

And so, it was, one Friday afternoon, that we came up to the CISD Study room only to find six giant packing crates addressed to Dan Plesch, directly from the late 1940s. On the face of it, perhaps not the most exciting extracurricular activity – but fascinating to look through and pore over.

A sample of the files found in the archive, these from Committee III examining the scope of war crimes prosecutions. Not pictured: the bugs who had to be shoo-ed out of the old boxes they were found in!

These boxes were in the basement of the EU Head of Delegation to the UN, Thomas Mayr-Harting, whose father worked for the UNWCC. As we opened the boxes – taking good care to air them out and evict the hectic colonies of insects that had taken up residence over the decades – we held dusty pieces of forgotten history right there in our hands. I touched a piece of paper that declared Adolf Hitler a war criminal in 1942, indicting him for a trial that would never happen. I touched a piece of paper explaining the legal basis for trying rape as a war crime in 1945, much earlier period than most people are aware of – an area of law that would not really be re-explored for fifty years, until the ICTY. I touched a piece of paper that established that “just following orders” could not excuse any liability of war criminals. These weren’t just dry, sterile records of events and proceedings – many of them were filled with hand-written amendments, allowing you to get a sense of the processes, debates, and human efforts that went on behind the scenes. Wrapped around those documents were newspaper pages from that time. I was able to read who had gotten married, the newest products being advertised, but also to analyse the rhetoric being used at the time. Not only did these help us understand the lived reality that those involved in the early UN, but they also showed how much the organisation was the centre of media attention at the time, with dozens of insights into its history in the wrapping paper alone. For instance, I would have never guessed that the USSR opposed calling the today so well known veto power as such and that the UK media would criticize it for it. Perhaps I could have found much of this information in history books and on the Internet, but there is something special and intriguing about these archives because you can see in such a vivid manner the processes, opinions, peoples’ work and efforts that laid the foundations of things that today we simply take for granted.

One of the most interesting things about this particular archive has been the way it’s shone a light on the politics behind the UNWCC’s work, and international criminal justice more generally. The US representative, Herbert Pell, can here be seen pushing for the Court to examine domestic crimes against humanity (such as the persecution of German Jews) alongside interstate war crimes; Pell’s activism on this played a major role in promoting the domestic components of the Nuremberg trials.

Digging up things from the past is not a task executed primarily out of curiosity – though the sheer enjoyment of opening an old archive shouldn’t be under-estimated but also due to its potentially useful value for today’s world. The next stages of the Research Project will allow us to engage with the archives in greater depth, and perhaps help us do exactly that.

We’ve recently had requests for a greater range of teaching and presentation material to be put up on our website, which, at present, is fairly heavily focused on old archival documents. While these are useful, sorting through old pdfs made from seventy-year-old microfilm can get a bit tiring (not to mention tough on your eyes!), so we’re also making available some of the presentations that members of the project have given at various events and lectures over the past few years. First up is a Powerpoint presentation – produced early in the UNWCC research project’s history – introducing the UNWCC to an unfamiliar audience, and originally delivered by Shanti Sattler and Dr Dan Plesch. It can be found here.

The project has a had a busy few days this past week, with our director Dr Dan Plesch presenting at a range of panels and to various groups in the Netherlands. We’ll be uploading some of the lecture materials – including a series of briefs on the UNWCC’s work in the Netherlands and Yugoslavia that contain new research, fresh from the archives – over the next few days, so stay tuned!

War Crimes Project Assistant Director Shanti Sattler recently contributed to a Mother Jones article about the US Senate Torture Report.  Check out the article  to see some of the UNWCC documents that show the United States’ prosecutions of torture as a war crime following World War II.

As you may have noticed, this website has changed in appearance pretty significantly over the past week or so – as momentum builds with the UNWCC research project, we’re hoping to revamp and significantly expand this site, so stay tuned for more updates soon!

We’re currently in the process of uploading some of the new archival and documentary material we’ve recently gained access to through the UN’s casefile archive, as well as some of the key documents, meeting minutes, and discussions that were produced by the UNWCC during its five-year operation. We’re also looking at consolidating some of the already-available material on the UNWCC that’s available across the web on this site, to make it easier for researchers, activists, and academics to access. If there’s anything particular that you’re looking for, get in touch – either via the comments to this post, or via the ‘contact’ section at the top of the site!

Link to the UN website, please click here. Link to the UN webcast, please click here.

The United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) was operational between 1943 and 1948 and played a vital role in preparing the ground for the war crimes trials that followed the Second World War. The evidence was submitted by 17 member nations for evaluation so that war criminals could be arrested and prosecuted. The archive also contains records of trials carried out in various Member States and presented to the Commission, including national military tribunals and the Military Tribunal of the Far East (Tokyo Trials). This panel will bring together experts to discuss the content of these archival documents, their impact on the development of international law and the International Criminal Court, as well as their potential use by and value to students and academics. A full copy of the records of the Commission was provided to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in July of this year; they were not freely open to the public earlier. This event is organized by The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme.

   Tuesday, 11 November 2014

      1:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.

     Conference Room 1, United Nations Headquarters, New York

Opening remarks:

Ms. Hua JIANG,Officer-in-Charge, Department of Public Information

H.E. Mr. Asoke KumarMUKERJI, Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations

Panellists:

Mr. Adama DIENG, Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide

Mrs. Bridget SISK, Chief, United Nations Archives and Records Management Section

Mr. Patrick J. TREANOR, Former member of the Office of Special Investigations, the United States Department of Justice

Mr. Dan PLESCH, Director, The Centre for Diplomatic Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS, University of London

Mr. Henry MAYER, Senior Adviser on Archives, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Moderator:

Mrs. Edith LEDERER, United Nations Correspondent for The Associated Press

After interviewing Dr. Plesch, The Guardian published an article on the recovered “hidden history” of war crimes indictments produced by the UN war crimes commission (UNWCC).

To read the article, please click here.

SAVE THE DATE

The United Nations Department of Public Information is hosting a panel discussion

“United Nations War Crimes Commission Records: Past, Present and Future” 

Tuesday, 11 November 2014
1:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.
Conference Room 1, United Nations Headquarters, New York

Opening remarks:
H.E. Mr. Asoke Kumar MUKERJI, Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations 

Panelists:
Mr. Adama DIENG, Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide 
Mrs. Bridget SISK, Chief, United Nations Archives and Records Management Section
Mr. Patrick J. TREANOR, Former member of the Office of Special Investigations, the United States Department of Justice
Mr. Dan PLESCH, Director, The Centre for Diplomatic Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS, University of London
Mr. Radu IOANID, Director, The International Archival Program, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Moderator:
Ms. Edith LEDERER, United Nations Correspondent for AP

RSVP HERE

Working in partnership with the Grotius Centre of Leiden University and a team of leading legal practitioners and academics, the War Crimes Project is proud to announce the online release of the Special Symposium of the Criminal Law Forum focused on the UNWCC.  With fourteen articles and a foreword by Justice Richard Goldstone, the Special Symposium highlights the work of the UNWCC and some of the national representatives to the Commission.
Visit Springer Online to see the contents and download the articles.  Hard copies are also available from the publisher.