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31 Sing. L. Rev. 3 (2013)
The Singapore War Crimes Trials and Their Relevance Today

handle is hein.journals/singlrev31 and id is 17 raw text is: Singapore Law Review (2013) 31 Sing L Rev THE SINGAPORE WAR CRIMES TRIALS AND THEIR RELEVANCE TODAY DAVID J COHEN* This article is a revised version of the 24h Singapore Law Review Lecture delivered by Professor David Cohen, Sidney and MargaretAncker Professor Emeritus in Rhetoric and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Cohen is the Director and founder of the War Crimes Studies Center at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Senior Fellow in International Humanitarian Law and the Director of the Asian International Justice Initiative at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. Professor Cohen has authored numerous publications and directs an international project on the WWII war crimes trials in Asia, the Pacific, and Europe. He has also monitored and re- ported on the East Timor trials before the Serious Crimes Panel in Dili and the Ad Hoc Human Rights Court in Jakarta. I. INTRODUCTION In the aftermath of World War II (WWII), the countries that had been occupied by or fought against Japan determined that there must be accountability for the atrocities systematically perpetrated by Japanese forces everywhere in the so called Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Following the pattern that the Allies had also established in Europe with the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (IMT), an International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)' was created to try the highest level Japanese leaders, with one notable exception, for waging aggressive war and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Asian and the Pacific from 1931 to 1945. The notable exception I referred to was, of course, Emperor Hirohito, whom the White House and Downing Street decided not to prosecute at that time for reasons of political expediency. They believed that he could be a useful tool of their policy for the pacification and democratisation of Japan and decided to use him as such so long as he was so needed. In the end, he was never prosecuted and the Tokyo Tribunal ended its work in 1948. This was to be the last international criminal tribunal until the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 1994. Our concern for this present discussion is not with the Tokyo Tribunal, but rather, with * Executive Director, WSD HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University; Professor of Law, University of Hawaii School of Law. 1 Hereinafter referred to as the Tokyo Tribunal.

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