Cato Institute
Policy Analysis
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Page 5
has a similar view of the Nuremberg comparison.  He ex-
plains, "There is a frequently cited precedent for using a
legal tribunal and the notion of war crimes to bring 'jus-
tice' to a legal order that seems incapable of enforcing the
rules outsiders regard as vital: Nuremberg.  But the prece-
dent fails because the two situations are not analogous.
. . . Nuremberg was a victors' tribunal."6  Rubin adds that
Nuremberg was also in the middle of Germany and its greatest
success was in exposing to the German people themselves the
crimes committed by their government.  Furthermore, at
Nuremberg the Nazi archives were open to the defense as well
as to the prosecution, and the need for Allied secrecy did
not inhibit the ability of the defense to present evidence.
But the proposed ICC will not be a "victors' tribunal," and
it will encounter many of the same problems the Yugoslavia
tribunal does.  Rubin explains that
the documents and testimony needed for an effec-
tive defense are hard to expose and bring to the
tribunal; there is no reason to expect the Bosnian
Serbs to publish their internal records, and no
reason to think that the Serbian Serbs would want
those records, or their own Cabinet minutes that
might reflect those records, exposed.  Nor is
there any reason to expect the Bosnian Muslims or
Croatians to volunteer their own records, which
might exculpate some low-level defendants by in-
criminating higher-level officials.7
Nonetheless, many proponents of the ICC suggest that
the existence of the court will still have a deterrent
effect on potential war criminals.  Former president Jimmy
Carter, for example, says that "the most important thing in
knowing that the international criminal court is there, I
think would be a great deterrent among those who might be
inclined to perpetuate these kinds of crimes."8  Similarly,
Norman Dorsen of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and
Morton Halperin of the Twentieth Century Fund argue that the
ICC is needed "to deter those who would contemplate such
horrendous crimes."9  But according to Rubin, there is no
evidence that holding war crimes trials reduces the number
of threats to international peace and security.  If any-
thing, the opposite is true: making war less atrocious makes
it more likely.  The creation of war crimes courts, he con-
cludes, seems really "to have been aimed at making lawyers
the 'guardians' of a violent society, in which war is all
right as long as it is played by rules to which the con-