Stern Justice: The Forgotten Story of Australia, Japan and the Pacific War Crimes Trials
Viking, $34.99 pb, 390 pp, 9780143793335
Stern Justice: The Forgotten Story of Australia, Japan and the Pacific War Crimes Trials by Adam Wakeling
Justice or vengeance? This is always the question raised by war crimes trials, although it might be noted that they are a relatively recent historical phenomenon. Some were proposed at the end of the Great War but never eventuated. The original and best known is, of course, Nuremberg at the end of World War II. Over the decades, there have been various prosecutions by the International Criminal Court, particularly concerning events in the Balkans in the 1990s, and by some one-off tribunals, such as in relation to the killings in Rwanda in 1994.
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