Interpreters and War Crimes (Edition 1) Takeda, Kayoko
International Journal of Research Studies in Language Learning,
01/2021, Volume:
1, Issue:
4
eBook, Book Review
Open access
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book raises new questions and provides different perspectives on the roles, responsibilities, ethics and protection of interpreters in war while ...investigating the substance and agents of Japanese war crimes and legal aspects of interpreters’ taking part in war crimes. Informed by studies on interpreter ethics in conflict, historical studies of Japanese war crimes and legal discussion on individual liability in war crimes, Takeda provides a detailed description and analysis of the 39 interpreter defendants and interpreters as witnesses of war crimes at British military trials against the Japanese in the aftermath of the Pacific War, and tackles ethical and legal issues of various risks faced by interpreters in violent conflict.The book first discusses the backgrounds, recruitment and wartime activities of the accused interpreters at British military trials in addition to the charges they faced, the defence arguments and the verdicts they received at the trials, with attention to why so many of the accused were Taiwanese and foreign-born Japanese. Takeda provides a contextualized discussion, focusing on the Japanese military’s specific linguistic needs in its occupied areas in Southeast Asia and the attributes of interpreters who could meet such needs. In the theoretical examination of the issues that emerge, the focus is placed on interpreters’ proximity to danger, visibility and perceived authorship of speech, legal responsibility in war crimes and ethical issues in testifying as eyewitnesses of criminal acts in violent hostilities. Takeda critically examines prior literature on the roles of interpreters in conflict and ethical concerns such as interpreter neutrality and confidentiality, drawing on legal discussion of the ineffectiveness of the superior orders defence and modes of individual liability in war crimes. The book seeks to promote intersectoral discussion on how interpreters can be protected from exposure to manifestly unlawful acts such as torture.
Stay the hand of vengeance Bass, Gary Jonathan
2014., 20140428, 2014, 2000, 2014-04-28, Volume:
93
eBook
International justice has become a crucial part of the ongoing political debates about the future of shattered societies like Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Chile. Why do our governments ...sometimes display such striking idealism in the face of war crimes and atrocities abroad, and at other times cynically abandon the pursuit of international justice altogether? Why today does justice seem so slow to come for war crimes victims in the Balkans? In this book, Gary Bass offers an unprecedented look at the politics behind international war crimes tribunals, combining analysis with investigative reporting and a broad historical perspective. The Nuremberg trials powerfully demonstrated how effective war crimes tribunals can be. But there have been many other important tribunals that have not been as successful, and which have been largely left out of today's debates about international justice. This timely book brings them in, using primary documents to examine the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, the Armenian genocide, World War II, and the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia.
Bass explains that bringing war criminals to justice can be a military ordeal, a source of endless legal frustration, as well as a diplomatic nightmare. The book takes readers behind the scenes to see vividly how leaders like David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton have wrestled with these agonizing moral dilemmas. The book asks how law and international politics interact, and how power can be made to serve the cause of justice.
Bass brings new archival research to bear on such events as the prosecution of the Armenian genocide, presenting surprising episodes that add to the historical record. His sections on the former Yugoslavia tell--with important new discoveries--the secret story of the politicking behind the prosecution of war crimes in Bosnia, drawing on interviews with senior White House officials, key diplomats, and chief prosecutors at the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Bass concludes that despite the obstacles, legalistic justice for war criminals is nonetheless worth pursuing. His arguments will interest anyone concerned about human rights and the pursuit of idealism in international politics.
Japanese war criminals Wilson, Sandra; Cribb, Robert; Trefalt, Beatrice ...
2017., 20170214, 2017, 2017-01-03
eBook
Beginning in late 1945, the United States, Britain, China, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and later the Philippines, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China convened national courts ...to prosecute Japanese military personnel for war crimes. The defendants included ethnic Koreans and Taiwanese who had served with the armed forces as Japanese subjects. In Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East tried Japanese leaders. While the fairness of these trials has been a focus for decades, Japanese War Criminals instead argues that the most important issues arose outside the courtroom. What was the legal basis for identifying and detaining subjects, determining who should be prosecuted, collecting evidence, and granting clemency after conviction? The answers to these questions helped set the norms for transitional justice in the postwar era and today contribute to strategies for addressing problematic areas of international law. Examining the complex moral, ethical, legal, and political issues surrounding the Allied prosecution project, from the first investigations during the war to the final release of prisoners in 1958, Japanese War Criminals shows how a simple effort to punish the guilty evolved into a multidimensional struggle that muddied the assignment of criminal responsibility for war crimes. Over time, indignation in Japan over Allied military actions, particularly the deployment of the atomic bombs, eclipsed anger over Japanese atrocities, and, among the Western powers, new Cold War imperatives took hold. This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the construction of the postwar international order in Asia and to our comprehension of the difficulties of implementing transitional justice.
Human Rights after Hitlerreveals thousands of forgotten US and Allied war crimes prosecutions against Hitler and other Axis war criminals based on a popular movement for justice that stretched from ...Poland to the Pacific. These cases provide a great foundation for twenty-first-century human rights and accompany the achievements of the Nuremberg trials and postwar conventions. They include indictments of perpetrators of the Holocaust made while the death camps were still operating, which confounds the conventional wisdom that there was no official Allied response to the Holocaust at the time. This history also brings long overdue credit to the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), which operated during and after World War II.
From the 1940s until a recent lobbying effort by Plesch and colleagues, the UNWCC's files were kept out of public view in the UN archives under pressure from the US government. The book answers why the commission and its files were closed and reveals that the lost precedents set by these cases have enormous practical utility for prosecuting war crimes today. They cover US and Allied prosecutions of torture, including "water treatment," wartime sexual assault, and crimes by foot soldiers who were "just following orders." Plesch's book will fascinate anyone with an interest in the history of the Second World War as well as provide ground-breaking revelations for historians and human rights practitioners alike.
Reconciliation by Stealth advances a novel approach to evaluating the effects of transitional justice in postconflict societies. Through her examination of the Balkan conflicts, Denisa Kostovicova ...asks what happens when former adversaries discuss legacies of violence and atrocity, and whether it is possible to do so without further deepening animosities.Reconciliation by Stealth shifts our attention from what people say about war crimes, to how they deliberate past wrongs. Bringing together theories of democratic deliberation and peacebuilding, Kostovicova demonstrates how people from opposing ethnic groups reconcile through reasoned, respectful, and empathetic deliberation about a difficult legacy. She finds that expression of ethnic difference plays a role in good-quality deliberation across ethnic lines, while revealed intraethnic divisions help deliberators expand moral horizons previously narrowed by conflict. In the process, people forge bonds of solidarity and offset divisive identity politics that bears upon their deliberations. Reconciliation by Stealth shows us the importance of theoretical and methodological innovation in capturing how transitional justice can promote reconciliation, and points to the untapped potential of deliberative problem-solving to repair relationships fractured by conflict.
