The Nuremberg prosecutor`s office decided to make conspiracy to commit crimes against peace a separate charge from crimes against peace. They expanded this charge of conspiracy to conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. Although the charges brought against the German defendants at Nuremberg largely stemmed from pre-war international treaties, the tribunal was controversial even in Allied countries. Several prominent figures in Allied governments, including British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, initially advocated a much more extreme approach, advocating the summary execution of German war criminals. However, the governments of the Soviet Union, Britain, France and the United States eventually agreed to a joint tribunal with judges and prosecutors from each of these countries. In order to combat the accusation that the tribunal was only victors` justice, the Allies went to great lengths to provide defendants with counsel of their own choosing, as well as secretarial, shorthand and translation services. With regard to some of the most questionable legal issues, such as the ambiguous charge of conspiracy, the Allies ensured that none of the accused were convicted on that charge alone. Nevertheless, some Germans accused the Allies of conducting an unfair trial with a predetermined outcome. Several critics of the tribunal rightly criticized the efforts of Soviet participants to attribute Soviet atrocities, such as the massacre of Polish officers and Katyn intelligentsia, to German troops. Other IMT critics noted that Nazi defendants could not appeal their convictions. Despite these beliefs, the IMT is now widely regarded as a remarkably fair execution of justice. In addition, several main objectives defined by its architects have been achieved.

The final London agreement created the system on which surviving Nazi leaders and Nazi criminal organizations would be brought to justice. The law provided for four counts of crimes for which German leaders were to be brought to justice. The first charge was conspiracy – conspiracy to participate in the other three counts. The second count was “crimes against peace”, that is, the actual planning, preparation and conduct of a war of aggression. This charge has been widely interpreted as criminalizing war to change the status quo. Therefore, the Germans could not use the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles to justify the war to provoke a revision. Twenty-four people were charged, as well as six Nazi organizations classified as criminal (such as the “Gestapo” or the secret state police). One of the accused was declared medically unfit, while a second man committed suicide before the trial began. Hitler and two of his most important collaborators, Heinrich Himmler (1900-45) and Joseph Goebbels (1897-45), committed suicide in the spring of 1945 before they could be tried. Defendants were allowed to choose their own lawyers, and the most common defence strategy was that the crimes defined in the London Charter were examples of retroactive law; That is, they were laws that criminalized acts committed before they were drafted.

Another defense was that the trial was a form of victors` justice – the Allies applied a harsh standard to crimes committed by the Germans and clemency to crimes committed by their own soldiers. Many perpetrators of Nazi crimes were never tried or punished. The first forty years after Nuremberg were a period of slow progress in the development of international criminal law. There is no doubt that international criminal law has evolved in recent years. Indeed, if international criminal law is defined as the prosecution of individuals for “international crimes” such as war crimes or crimes against humanity, then there has been no such law for most of the twentieth century. On the eve of the twentieth century, attempts to regulate war at the Hague Conference of 1899 and again in 1907 were limited by notions of state sovereignty. As the Nuremberg judges pointed out in 1946: “Nowhere does the Hague Convention characterize these practices [methods of warfare] as criminal, nor as punishment, nor as a mention of a tribunal to convict and punish offenders.” (1) It was only when the world was shaken by ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda that the UN, which was no longer paralyzed by the Cold War, was able to act. Nations that had been unwilling to intervene to prevent the carnage now realized that certain measures were essential. For the first time since Nuremberg, the UN Security Council quickly created a new ad hoc international criminal court. Spurred on by a shocked public request, the UN Secretariat was able to draft the statutes of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in about 8 weeks – the same time it took to approve the Charter at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The ICTY became operational in 1994.

It led to the rapid establishment of a similar ad hoc tribunal to try genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda. Principle IV The fact that a person acted on orders from his or her Government or a superior does not absolve him or her of responsibility under international law, provided that he or she has actually been able to make a moral choice. If the charge of conspiracy in count 1 meant nothing more than that those who plan a murder and knowingly finance and equip the murderer are guilty, no one would dispute the charge.