Victor's justice
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The label "victor's justice" (in German, Siegerjustiz) is applied by advocates to a situation in which they believe that a victorious nation is applying different rules to judge what is right or wrong for their own forces and for those of the (former) enemy. Advocates generally charge that the difference in rules amounts to hypocrisy and leads to injustice. Targets of the label may consider it derogatory.
Closely related is "Vae Victis behaviour", where victor unilaterally changes the agreed treaties or their interpretations and is seen as a form of victor's justice.
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Why should victors be just?
The concept that a victor should be just appears to be a recent idea, possibly being part of the just war doctrine. In previous times, victors did as they liked with their defeated enemies, killing, torturing, mutilating and enslaving their populations. This was accepted as the way the world was.
For example, Viriathus was assassinated by traitors on Roman orders. When the traitors tried to get their pay, the Roman general ordered their execution allegedly saying: "Rome does not pay traitors".
However, the world subsequently aspired to higher ethical standards, and in the 19th century the Geneva conventions set up laws of war that proscribed extreme behavior, and created the concept of war crimes.
Allegations of victor's justice
Claimed examples of victor's justice have included:
- the actions of the Communists after the October Revolution
- those of the Brazilian government after the Canudos insurrection around 1900
After World War II, there were calls for vengeance on Nazi Germany. The Western Allies made a self-conscious decision to carry out war crimes trials, and to set up the Marshall Plan (a program to finance economic restructuring of Europe by providing grants and loans), rather than to simply executing their enemies, and imposing reparations on the German people as it has been suggested by the so called Morgenthau plan.
For the U.S., the main economic beneficiary of WWI and WWII, establishing the Marshall plan was no real problem, was useful in encouraging good relations in Europe and in the end by no doubt they earned much more money than they could have ever obtained from Germany and Europe by conventional reparations.
The Soviet Union however followed a similar plan to the Treaty of Versailles of World War I in the areas of Germany that it occupied. Throughout East Germany, whole industrial plants were dismantled and shipped to the Soviet Union for later (unsuccessful) use. German prisoners of war and civilians were deported to the Soviet Union for use as forced labor, some never returning. To this day the former East Germany still has not recovered its former prosperity.
However, at the Nuremberg Criminal Court for war crimes only German war criminals were prosecuted, whereas what are viewed by some as war crimes by Allied troops were not. Numerous Germans and others consider this to be a betrayal of the principles of the Nuremberg Trials.
Examples of alleged Allied war crimes during and after World War II included:
- The Katyn Massacre, though technically the Soviet Union was not one of the Allies at the time. Soviet prosecutors at Nuremberg would later try to indict Germany for this atrocity.
- The Laconia Incident. German Admiral Karl Dönitz would later be prosecuted for war crimes for the resulting Laconia Order even though Allied submarines often refused to rescue survivors as well.
- the treatment of some alleged Nazi collaborators after World War II (see Pursuit of Nazi collaborators)
- the deaths of thousands of German POWs in transit camps such as the Rheinwiesenlager after World War II (althought a German commission found that fatalites were 4,532)
- the systematic rape of German, Central European and Eastern European women by the Soviet Red Army
- World War II evacuation and expulsion as sanctioned by the Allies at the Potsdam Conference
- The Evacuation of East Prussia as agree at the Potsdam Conference
- Operation Keelhaul
None of these resulted in war crimes prosecutions.
Attempts to ensure the fairness of war crimes prosecutions
Since then, the accusation of victor's justice has arisen in every subsequent conflict where war crimes prosecutions have been made. Examples of include the wars in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and Afghanistan.
The International Criminal Court was set up in 2003 as a treaty arrangement between member states in an attempt to provide a neutral international court that avoids the accusation of "victor's justice", and that would prosecute all alleged war crimes, on either side of any conflict. The United States has currently refused to join the ICC, and critics of this decision sometimes claim that this comes out of a desire for victor's justice - given that the United States is almost certain to win any war it participates in. See the article on the court for more detail on US and other objections to it.
Current allegations of victor's justice
- The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY), financed mostly by NATO countries, prosecutes mostly people from states attacked by NATO countries.
Two further recent conflicts in which the U.S. have been involved have led to allegations of victor's justice:
- After the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. administration set up detention camps such as Camp X-Ray where they argue that as these the detainees are Illegal enemy combatants in an ongoing war, they can be held indefinitely before being tried. However judicial review of this position is currently under way in the United States and it is by no means clear that this is the correct legal interpretation of the detainees legal rights under United States law.
- There has been concern that the new regime in Iraq may not have the legal skills or inclination to try war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed by the former Iraqi Ba'ath regime fairly and that this represents a desire for victor's justice through show trials. Commentators on international humanitarian law have stated that it has to be done this way because, the ICC cannot prosecute crimes committed prior to its creation and the U.S. administration claims that there is not the international will to set up another ICTFY style court. In accordance to international law all members of the coalition armed forces during the war and subsequent military occupation can only be tired in an Iraqi or International court if their own judicial systems do not fulfil the requirements of international law. So far Several countries have tried some of the military personel for commiting humanitarian crimes, for example both the United States and the United Kingdom have tried soldiers for physically abusing prisoners in Iraq.