Journey over Strange Ground: From Demjanjuk to the International Criminal Court Regime
![handle is hein.journals/geoimlj13 and id is 393 raw text is: JOURNEY OVER STRANGE GROUND:
FROM DEMJANJUK TO THE INTERNATIONAL
CRIMINAL COURT REGIME*
JOHN WILLIAM HEATH, JR.**
I. INTRODUCTION
On September 22, 1993, John Demjanjuk, clad in a bullet-proof vest and
surrounded by police, boarded a non-stop El-Al flight from Tel Aviv to
Cleveland, Ohio.' Having been acquitted by the Israeli Supreme Court of
charges of being Ivan the Terrible, a notorious guard at the Treblinka
concentration camp during the Second World War, Demjanjuk was being
deported back to the United States.2 John Demjanjuk's tortuous journey had
begun in the United States, the country that had been his adoptive home for
nearly thirty years and had then stripped him of its protection. Now, as he
returned to his family as a stateless alien, both he and the legal regime
charged with ridding the United States of former Nazi war criminals found
themselves on strange ground indeed.
Current efforts to bring international war criminals to justice trace their
lineage to the creation of the Nuremberg tribunal after the occupation of
Germany.3 Under the London Agreement of August 8, 1945, the victorious
Allied Powers established the International Military Tribunal (IMT),
consisting of both judges and prosecutors empowered to bring and hear cases
of war criminals whose offenses have no particular geographical location
whether they be accused individually or in their capacity as members of
organizations....4 Significantly, Article VI of the Charter of the Interna-
tional Military Tribunal defined a new genre of international crimes of
* See Yamashita v. Styer, 327 U.S. 1, 43-44 (1946) (Rutledge, J., dissenting) (We are on strange
ground... Mass guilt we do not impute to individuals, perhaps in any case but certainly in none where the
person is not charged or shown actively to have participated in or shown actively to have participated in or
knowingly to have failed in taking action to prevent the wrongs done by others...). The Yamashita case
came in 1946 in the aftermath of Nuremberg and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals. Yamashita represented
arguably the first time that American domestic courts (here the Supreme Court) had considered issues
related to the trial and disposition of international war criminals.
** A.B., magna cum laude, Harvard University, 1997; J.D. Candidate, Georgetown University Law
Center, May 2000. Many thanks go to Professor John R. Schmertz of the Georgetown University Law
Center for his comments and assistance in preparing this Note. To Julie and John Michel.
1. See YORAM SHEFTEL, DEFENDING IVAN THE TERRIBLE: THE CONSPIRACY TO CONVICT JOHN
DEMJANJUK 445 (1996).
2. See id.
3. Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945 (V-E Day).
4. Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis,
Aug. 8, 1945, art. 1, 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, 282 [hereinafter London Agreement]. See K. Lesli
Ligomer, Note and Comment, Nazi Concentration Camp Guard Service Equals Good Moral Charac-
ter?: United States v. Linden, 12 AM. U. J. INT'L L. & POL'Y 145, 148-50 (1997).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/geoimlj13&div=30&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Journey over Strange Ground: From Demjanjuk to the International Criminal Court Regime
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