In the mid-1940s following the Allies’ World War II victory, a tribunal in Nuremberg held historic trials of Nazi officials, with a second one in Tokyo aimed at Japanese political and military leaders. The key crime in question was one for which no one had been tried before and no one has since been tried in an international setting—the crime of waging aggressive war, at the time called crimes against peace.
Some legal scholars and public figures say Russia’s leaders should similarly be prosecuted for invading Ukraine. They envision a special tribunal with high-ranking defendants, Russian President Vladimir Putin chief among them. The tribunal would “signal our resolve that the crime of aggression will not be tolerated, and that we will leave no stone unturned in bringing to an end the terrible events we are now seeing,” said a March statement by several international lawyers, a former Nuremberg prosecutor and former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown…
The crime of aggression is about what comes before the war crimes: the invasion itself—planning it, starting it, waging it. Proponents say prosecuting Mr. Putin for war crimes at the ICC, while not impossible, would be difficult because judges need to be persuaded with evidence of a link between the Kremlin’s decisions and specific brutalities in the battlefield. A crime of aggression charge, they say, would allow prosecutors to go straight to Moscow.
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