Winning justice

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Winner justice is a political buzzword . It describes the jurisdiction and jurisdiction usually carried out by a victorious power after a war , which may be perceived as disadvantageous by the defeated.

Post war justice

In Germany and Austria , members of the political right in particular refer to the Nuremberg trials , aviation trials and other criminal proceedings against members of the Axis powers after the Second World War carried out by Allied courts as victors' justice. The accusation of the victorious justice was used by the defense lawyers of the accused representatives of the National Socialist leadership in an effective way to deny the legality of the Nuremberg war crimes trials . The Allied post-war justice system was not only welcomed as a return to a legal system, but was also often perceived as “victorious justice”, meaning an attitude and perspective that was imposed and not in line with society. It showed that the forms of criminal law developed in the course of the German post-war justice system were particularly dependent on the political and social context and that there was a clear tendency towards the negation of criminal responsibility. The deputy of the American chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Robert Kempner , commented on these tendencies: "In the world there is only victorious justice ... only victorious justice." (1976 in Marcel Ophüls ' documentary The Memory of Justice , German: Not guilty? ) The controversial historian and former professor at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich , Franz Wilhelm Seidler , is one of the authors who speak of the Allies' victorious justice in recent publications .

At the beginning of the 1990s, after the Cold War, the international ad-hoc criminal courts for Yugoslavia and Rwanda were established . With the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998 the basis for the permanent court in The Hague was created. In retrospect, the Nuremberg trials, vilified as “victorious justice”, presented themselves as the birth of international criminal law , which makes individuals criminally responsible for state actions and rejects government immunity.

Coming to terms with the past of the German Democratic Republic is sometimes referred to as “winning justice”, especially with regard to the criminal law prohibition of retroactive effects . The highest court rulings of the Federal Republic of Germany relied on the one hand on Radbruch's formula to come to terms with the GDR past , according to which law that violates essential fundamental principles would become injustice, and on the other hand on a constitutional interpretation of the law of the GDR, which differs from the factual interpretation by the GDR judiciary .

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literature

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Winfried R. Garscha: No “Siegerjustiz” - 50 years ago the trial of the main war criminals came to an end in Nuremberg (PDF; 231 kB): “That the trial remained present in the collective memory was certainly primarily due to its permanent one Denunciation as 'victorious justice' by the political right in Germany and Austria, which should cast doubt on the legality of the procedure. ” September 1996, accessed on July 12, 2008.
  2. ^ Annette Weinke : The Nuremberg Trials . CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-53604-2 , p. 57.
  3. ↑ Hanno Loewy , Bettina Winter (ed.): Nazi “euthanasia” in front of the court . Campus, Frankfurt 1996, ISBN 3-593-35442-X ; P. 21 on Stw. “Early Allied Denazification Policy”.
  4. ^ Profile The Memory of Justice (1976) [1] at imdb
  5. ^ Albert A. Feiber: Phantom of the Mountains . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 13, 2001, p. 10.
  6. ↑ Multiple use of the term in: Franz Wilhelm Seidler: Siegerjustiz. The concentration camp trials of the allied occupying powers 1945-50 . Pour le Mérite, Selent 2006; Franz Wilhelm Seidler: The right in the winning hand. The 13 Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949 . Pour le Mérite Verlag, Selent 2007 and: Schuldig! The allied victorious trials against soldiers, police officers and civilians. Flier trials, Malmedy trials, Oradour trials, Shanghai trials . Pour le Mérite Verlag, Selent 2008.
  7. ^ Werle and Jessberger: Principles of International Criminal Law. P. 13 f.
  8. ^ Werle and Jessberger: Principles of International Criminal Law. P. 17 f.
  9. ↑ Carl-Friedrich Stuckenberg: International law and criminal crimes. In: International jurisprudence: Selected decisions on international law in retrospect. Ed .: Jörg Menzel, Jeannine Hoffmann, Tobias Pierlings, Mohr Siebeck 2005, ISBN 3-16-148515-7 , p. 769.
  10. ↑ Otto Köhler : Hitler left - they stayed. The German post-war in 16 examples. (Right to win), KVV specifically, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-930786-04-4 , p. 36f
  11. ↑ Bernhard Schlink , Rule of Law and Revolutionary Justice , inaugural lecture at the HU Berlin on April 14, 1994, p. 4 (PDF; 120 kB).
  12. ^ Victory justice after reunification? DRiZ 2010, p. 314, 315 (Pro: Prof. Dr. jur. Habil. Erich Buchholz ; Contra: VRLG a. D. Hansgeorg Bräutigam ); Bernhard Schlink, Rule of Law and Revolutionary Justice ( Memento from January 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) , inaugural lecture at the HU Berlin from April 14, 1994, p. 6 ff. (PDF; 120 kB)