Sunday, January 4, 2009: 11:50 AM
Central Park East (Sheraton New York)
My paper will examine the role of Soviet legal experts in the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 and in the creation of the postwar "human rights regime." In particular, it will show how some of the same Soviet legal experts who had participated in (and provided the legal rationale for) the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s went on to have a positive role in IMT and in the framing of postwar international law regarding war crimes and crimes against peace. At the same time, it will demonstrate how the Soviet regime and is lawyers set out after the IMT to introduce new Nuremberg-inspired laws into the Soviet Criminal Code—and how these laws were then invoked in the postwar USSR to punish Soviet "returnees" from German POW camps, and other groups on trumped-up charges of forming fifth columns and plotting terrorist acts against the Soviet state. The paper will make a point that might seem obvious, but is often forgotten: that the same legal mechanisms, concepts, and institutions can be used for positive or negative ends, to buttress legitimate or illegitimate processes, in liberal or authoritarian states.