Nuremberg principles

Lore & Background

The Nuremberg principles were developed by UN organs under the limited mandate of Article 13 in Chapter IV of the United Nations Charter, which obliges the General Assembly to initiate studies and make recommendations encouraging the progressive development of international law. In 1947, under UN General Assembly Resolution 177 (II), the International Law Commission was directed to formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal. The Commission concluded that since the Nuremberg Principles had been affirmed by the General Assembly, its task was merely to formulate them, not to express appreciation of them as principles of international law.

Reader's Guide

The Nuremberg principles establish that any person who commits an act constituting a crime under international law is responsible and liable to punishment, regardless of internal law, official position, or superior orders. Principle IV, which rejects the 'superior orders' defense, is legally supported by certain articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights dealing with conscientious objection and by principles in the UNHCR Handbook on refugee status for conscientious objectors. The principles' power is limited because the UN was not given legislative power to enact binding rules of international law; instead, the principles were developed under the General Assembly's powers of study and recommendation. The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court addresses superior orders in Article 33, which some interpret as allowing the defense for war crimes under certain conditions, though this interpretation is debated. The principles remain foundational to modern international criminal law, though their status as customary international law depends on state practice and international conviction.

Did You Know?

• Principle IV can be traced back to the rejection of the 'superior orders' defense after the Nuremberg Trials, but it also includes the crucial caveat that a moral choice must have been possible.
• The Nuremberg Principles were first established in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945, not by the International Law Commission, which only formulated them in 1950.
• Principle VI explicitly lists three categories of crimes: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—not just war crimes.

The Clash of Allied Visions

After the devastation of World War II, the four victorious powers could not agree on how to deal with Nazi leadership. The Soviet Union, having suffered 27 million dead—roughly a seventh of its prewar population—pushed for a predetermined show trial reminiscent of the 1930s Moscow proceedings, aiming to extract war reparations and publicly demonstrate German guilt. Britain, still haunted by the perceived failures of post-World War I prosecutions, leaned toward simply executing the top leaders without a formal trial. The United States, by contrast, wanted a proceeding that would be perceived as legitimate, serving both to reform Germany and to showcase the superiority of Western legal institutions. These conflicting aims remained unresolved even at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. It was not until the London Conference from late June to early August 1945 that France, the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States finally hammered out a workable framework, though until the very end of those negotiations, it remained uncertain whether any tribunal would materialize at all.

Forging New Legal Categories

The Nuremberg Charter represented a radical departure from existing international law. While war crimes had long been recognized as violations of the laws and customs of war, those rules did not reach a government's treatment of its own citizens—making the systematic murder of German Jews legally awkward to prosecute. The concept of crimes against peace, or waging aggressive war, was largely the intellectual contribution of Soviet jurist Aron Trainin, whose ideas were reprinted in Western publications and widely adopted. At the London Conference, American negotiator and Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson threatened to withdraw the United States entirely if aggression could not be prosecuted, since it had been the very rationale for American entry into the war. He ultimately conceded on the precise definition of crimes against peace, as the other three Allies feared it would undermine the Security Council's freedom of action. The result was a legal instrument that criminalized conduct for which no prior statute had existed, a move that drew sharp criticism for its retroactive character.

The Tribunal and Its Verdict

From 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946, the International Military Tribunal sat in occupied Nuremberg, putting on trial twenty-two of the most prominent surviving Nazi figures across political, military, and economic spheres, along with six German organizations. The proceedings served purposes far beyond mere punishment: the tribunal was tasked with assembling an irrefutable evidentiary record of Nazi atrocities, delivering a history lesson to the German public, and delegitimizing the traditional German elite. The verdict echoed the prosecution in branding the planning and waging of aggressive war 'the supreme international crime' because it 'contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.' Most defendants faced additional charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, with the Holocaust forming a central pillar of the case. Following the IMT, the United States conducted twelve further trials targeting lower-level perpetrators, with a sharper focus on the Holocaust itself.

Seeds of a New Legal Order

Controversial in their own era for criminalizing aggression retroactively, the Nuremberg proceedings are now widely regarded as 'the true beginning of international criminal law.' The most consequential innovation was the principle that individual human beings—rather than only states—could be held personally accountable for violations of international law. This shift emerged from a context of staggering scale: between 1939 and 1945, German armies had overrun Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Soviet Union, and the legal reckoning was premised on what was perceived as the singular brutality of the systematic murder of millions of Jews. Even before the war's end, governments-in-exile from nine occupied nations had called for an international court, and the 1943 Moscow Declaration had warned that Nazi leaders would be pursued 'to the uttermost ends of the earth.' The Nuremberg Charter ultimately translated those early aspirations into a functioning judicial process whose principles continue to shape international criminal justice.

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