A Conceptual History of War Crimes Trials

ARC Discovery grant commencing 2010

This project, being undertaken by APCML Director Professor Gerry Simpson, explores the purposes of war crimes trials, their legal significance and their social and political effects.

A highly successful three day international symposium to uncover and explore some unfamiliar war crimes trials, Untold Stories: Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials, was held at Melbourne Law School from 14-16 October 2010. The call for papers attracted wide interest from around the world and the final program included 32 speakers in 9 sessions, covering African, European, Pacific and South Asian Histories, Collaborators' Trials, Prosecuting the Industrialists, and final sessions on Traumatic History and Rethinking History. The Symposium convenors are currently preparing selected papers from the Symposium for publication in 2011.

The second in the War Crimes I-III series of Symposia will be held in July 2011. Affective States of International Criminal Justice will reflect on the emotional ties that bind international criminal justice communities.

Ms Monique Cormier was appointed on 1 July 2010 as Research Fellow for this project. She has undertaken wide ranging research of both historical and contemporary war crimes trials for a book being written by Professor Simpson. This includes archival research on the Commission of Fifteen established at Versailles to try the Kaiser after World War I and an examination of defamation trials for accusations of war crimes.

Monique has also been looking at Australia's war crimes legislation framework to identify impunity gaps and is following ad hoc trials against Somali pirates around the world. She is also closely monitoring the story of the three Australian soldiers who have been charged for the deaths of 6 civilians in Afghanistan, with a view to writing a paper for the project on the legal significance of these upcoming trials.

International Operations and Federal Police

International Operations and the Australian Federal Police: Devising a Legal Framework

Australian Research Council grant, in partnership with The Australian Federal Police

In the current environment of complex and rapidly changing regional threats to peace and security, the international deployment of Australian Federal Police (AFP) is at an unprecedented level. This situation has resulted in a range of new and pressing legal challenges experienced by the AFP relating to the legal mandate of such operations and the legal framework to be used during deployments. In an important collaboration with the AFP, combining academic expertise with practical experience, this project will provide a clear legal framework and operations guidelines for the planning, management and conduct of AFP deployments.

The project has three key outputs:

1/ 'Documents on the Law of UN Peace Operations', a comprehensive collection of primary source materials (Treaties, Declarations, UN Security Council Resolutions, and International Court of Justice Decisions) relevant to the legal bases for the establishment and functioning of UN peace operations, was published by OUP in March 2010 and was successfully launched at the Legal Challenges for International Policing Workshop in Canberra in May 2010.

2. An Operations Handbook for the management and conduct of AFP civil policing in overseas peace operations. A preliminary draft of the Handbook was completed in November 2009. We have worked through multiple iterations of the text and are now editing the final draft and anticipate publication by the end of 2010.

3. An international workshop to discuss and test the legal findings from the research that has been undertaken for the production of both the above publications. The workshop entitled Legal Challenges for International Policing and presented by APCML and the AFP (International Deployment Group and Legal) was held at the Australian Federal Police College in Canberra on 3 and 4 May 2010. The Workshop brought together leading academic thinkers and practitioners with extensive police operational experience from multiple deployments around the world. The key output from the Workshop will be a symposium issue of the Journal of International Peacekeeping which will feature edited versions of the Workshop papers. This issue is expected early in 2011.

The publication of the Operations Handbook and the Workshop papers will complete the Project.

Post World War II Law Report Series

Overview

This project is funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, in partnership with Defence Legal (the legal Division of the Department of Defence) and The Australian War Memorial, which commenced in January 2009.

The project aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic examination and analysis of the Australian national war crimes trials of (principally) Japanese in the post-World War II period. During the period 1945-51, 807 alleged Japanese B and C class war criminals were tried at Morotai, Wewak, Labuan, Rabaul, Darwin, Singapore, Hong Kong and Manus Island. 579 accused were convicted on one or more charges and 137 were sentenced to death and executed. The original trial proceedings and related documents are held in the National Archives of Australia http://www.naa.gov.au/. Most of the trials, which are held in series A471, are now accessible online through RecordSearch http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/recordsearch/index.aspx. Other relevant documents are held in the collections of the Australian War Memorial.

The Australian Law Reports Series will include a report of all 300 trials, as well as a historical essay on each of the trial locations. The law reports will open valuable Australian legal precedent to an increasingly important area of domestic and international law and insight into an aspect of Australian military-legal history hitherto largely unexplored.

The project is guided by Professor Tim McCormack of The University of Melbourne and the principal researchers are Dr Narrelle Morris, based at The University of Melbourne, and Dr Georgina Fitzpatrick, based at the Australian War Memorial.

The project received ethics approval from the Law Human Ethics Advisory Group on 5 August 2009.

Progress to Date

More than 200 of the law reports have been completed to date, as have several of the historical essays on the trial locations. It is expected that draft law reports and essays will be finalised in late 2011. The Australian Law Reports Series is expected to be published by academic publishers Martinus Nijhoff, beginning in 2012.

Further Information

Further information about the project may be sought from Dr Narrelle Morris, Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law, Melbourne Law School, nemorris@unimelb.edu.au .