The Tokyo Tribunal: Perspectives on Law, History and Memory

Marina Aksenova is a lawyer specializing in international criminal and comparative criminal law. Ms. Aksenova graduated with honours from the International University in Moscow. She holds an LL.M. in Public International Law from the University of Amsterdam and an M.Sc. in Criminal Justice and Criminology from the University of Oxford. Dr. Aksenova defended her Ph.D. entitled “Complicity in International Criminal Law” in 2014 at the European University Institute, in Florence. Prior to joining the IE Law School, she was as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts), Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen.

Diane Marie Amann is Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center, University of Georgia School of Law, Athens, Georgia, USA. Amann’s many publications include several essays on women as creators and shapers of law, peace and security; especially, of international criminal justice. She is writing a book on the roles that a multinational cohort of women played – as lawyers and legal aides, journalists and artists, interpreters and translators – during the post-World War II trials at Nuremberg. 

David Cohen is the Director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice and WSD Handa Professor in Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University. He is a leading expert in the fields of human rights, international law and transitional justice. Professor Cohen taught at UC Berkeley from 1979-2012 as the Ancker Distinguished Professor for the Humanities, and served as the founding Director of the Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center. His involvement in research in war crimes tribunals began in the mid-1990s with a project to collect the records of the national war crimes programmes conducted in approximately 20 countries in Europe and Asia after World War II. 

Robert Cribb is Professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. He is an historian of modern Indonesia, but with wider interests in other parts of Asia. He completed his B.A. at the University of Queensland and his Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He has held positions at Griffith University, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, the University of Queensland and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. His research focusses on national identity, mass violence, environmental politics, and historical geography.

David M. Crowe is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University and Professor Emeritus of History and Law at Elon University. His most recent publications include Stalin’s Soviet Justice: ‘Show’ Trials, War Crimes Trials, and Nuremberg (2019), “The German Plunder and Theft of Jewish Property in the General Government”, in Nazi Law: From Nuremberg to Nuremberg (2019), “Pearl Buck, Raphael Lemkin, and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention”, in Beyond ‘The Good Earth’: Transnational Perspectives on Pearl S. Buck (2019), and “MacArthur, Keenan, and the American Quest for Justice at IMFTE”, in Transcultural Justice: The Tokyo IMT Trial and the Allied Struggle for Justice (2018). He is currently writing Raphael Lemkin: The Life of a Visionary.

Viviane E. Dittrich is Deputy Director of the International Nuremberg Principles Academy. She is also Visiting Fellow at the Centre for International Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science (‘LSE’). Previously, she has been Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Visiting Researcher at iCourts (Centre of Excellence for International Courts), University of Copenhagen. She has published on the notion of legacy and the process of legacy building at the international criminal tribunals and has taught on international institutions, the politics of international law, global crime, and US foreign policy at the LSE, Royal Holloway, and Sciences Po Paris. 

Donald M. Ferencz is Visiting Professor at Middlesex University School of Law and the Convenor of the Global Institute for the Prevention of Aggression. He served as an NGO advisor to the Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression, charged with developing amendments to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (‘ICC’), defining the crime of aggression and setting forth the circumstances under which the ICC may exercise its aggression jurisdiction. His work in the field of international justice focuses primarily on strengthening the rule of law through universalization of the core crimes of the ICC.

Kerstin von Lingen is Professor in the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. From 2013 to 2017, she led an independent research group at Heidelberg University in the Cluster of Excellence, “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” entitled, “Transcultural Justice: Legal Flows and the Emergence of International Justice within the East Asian War Crimes Trials, 1946-1954”, supervising four doctoral dissertations on the Soviet, Chinese, Dutch and French war crimes trial policies in Asia, respectively.

Jolana Makraiová is Senior Officer for Interdisciplinary Research at the International Nuremberg Principles Academy. She is an international lawyer with extensive experience working at international tribunals, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Her expertise encompasses international criminal, international humanitarian and human rights law. 

Narrelle Morris is a Senior Lecturer in the Curtin Law School, Curtin University, Western Australia. She is the Principal Legal Researcher on the Australia Research Council (‘ARC’)-funded project “Australia’s Post-World War II War Crimes Trials of the Japanese: A Systematic and Comprehensive Law Reports Series”. She also held an ARC grant for 2014–2019 to research the Australian war crimes investigator and jurist Sir William Flood Webb.

Diane Orentlicher is Professor of Law at the Washington College of Law of American University. Professor Orentlicher, the author of Some Kind of Justice: The ICTY’s Impact in Bosnia and Serbia (Oxford University Press, 2018), has published and lectured extensively in the fields of international criminal law and transitional justice. As the United Nations Independent Expert on combating impunity, she updated the UN Set of principles for the protection and promotion of human rights through action to combat impunity (E/CN.4/2005/102/Add.1). Professor Orentlicher served as Deputy for War Crimes Issues in the US Department of State from 2009 through 2011. 

Philipp Osten is Professor of Criminal Law and International Criminal Law at Keio University, in Tokyo, Japan. Philipp Osten’s main field of research is international criminal law. He has conducted research on the history of international criminal trials and published a book on the Tokyo Tribunal, Der Tokioter Kriegsverbrecherprozeß und die japanische Rechtswissenschaft (Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin, 2003; Japanese translation by the author forthcoming). His recent research focuses on the ICC and he has published widely on issues pertaining to general principles of criminal law in the Rome Statute, and its domestic implementation in Japan, Germany and other countries.

Kuniko Ozaki is a former Judge at the International Criminal Court (‘ICC’). Prior to joining the ICC, she served as Director for Treaty Affairs for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and worked in a number of positions for the Japanese government, including as Ambassador and Special Assistant to the Foreign Ministry, Director for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in the Foreign Ministry, Director for Refugees in the Justice Ministry, and Specialist to the Criminal Affairs Bureau of the Justice Ministry. She has written extensively on international criminal law, refugee law and law of human rights. 

Christoph Safferling is Professor of Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law, International Criminal Law and Public International Law at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, where he is also the Director of the Research Unit International Criminal Law. His main fields of research are contemporary legal history, international criminal law, and the subjective elements of the crime. He has published several articles and books in criminal law, international law, and human rights law, inter alia, International Criminal Procedure (Oxford University Press, 2012) and co-edited the book The Nuremberg Trials: International Criminal Law since 1945 (De Gruyter Saur, Berlin, 2006), together with Herbert R. Reginbogin.

Franziska Seraphim is a historian of modern and contemporary Japan and the Director of the Asian Studies Program at Boston College. Her work has focused on the contested place of Japan’s empire and war in Asia in post-war politics, society and culture. She is currently writing a social history of the Allied transitional justice programme after World War II from a global and comparative perspective. Titled Geographies of Justice, it relates the different spatialities of the programme and its transformation through the 1940s and 1950s through the lens of Japanese and German war criminals’ prisons, from their vast spread across Asia and Europe to the dynamics within the American-run prisons in Sugamo, Tokyo and Landsberg, Bavaria, and the (inter)national politics of clemency. 

Gerry Simpson is Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science (‘LSE’) and a Fellow of the British Academy. He previously taught at the University of Melbourne (2007-2015), the Australian National University (1995-1998) and LSE (2000-2007), and has held visiting positions at ANU, Melbourne, New York University and Harvard. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge University Press, 2004, winner of the American Society of International Law Annual Prize for Creative Scholarship in 2005), and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity, 2007).

Kayoko Takeda is Professor of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan. Her main research interests lie in translation and interpreting in war, the history of interpreting and interpreter education. She is the author of Interpreting the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and a co-editor of New Insights in the History of Interpreting.

Yuma Totani is Professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of Hawaii and Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She specializes in the studies of post-World War II Allied war crimes trials in the Asia-Pacific region and especially the Tokyo Trial.

Beatrice Trefalt is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures, Literatures and Linguistics at Monash University, Australia. She is co-author, with Sandra Wilson, Robert Cribb and Dean Aszkielowicz, of Japanese War Criminals: The Politics of Justice After the Second World War (Columbia University Press, 2017). She has published articles and chapters on war crimes trials, as well as on broader war legacies in Japan and the region. Her latest publication is “The Battle of Saipan in Japanese Civilian Memoirs: Non-combatants, Soldiers and the Complexities of Surrender”, in Journal of Pacific History, 2018, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 252-67.

Sandra Wilson is a historian of modern Japan. She is Professor and Academic Chair of History, and a Fellow of the Asia Research Centre, at Murdoch University, Western Australia. She is the author of The Manchurian Crisis and Japanese Society, 1931-33 (Routledge, 2002) and, with Robert Cribb, Beatrice Trefalt and Dean Aszkielowicz, of Japanese War Criminals: The Politics of Justice After the Second World War (Columbia University Press, 2017). She also publishes on Japanese nationalism and continues to research Japanese war crimes.