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Between show-trials and Utopia: A study of the tu quoque defence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

Katerina Borrelli
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Abstract

Tu quoque, meaning in Latin ‘you too’, is a fallacy of relevance which targets the hypocrisy of the arguer rather than the truth of the advanced argument.

In international criminal tribunals, defendants who advance the defence choose not to argue for their innocence, but rather seek to shift the spotlight on the crimes committed by the prosecuting authority or by the opposing side to the conflict, so as to delegitimize the entire prosecution as a form of ‘victor’s justice’. According to legal doxa, the argument has never been accepted in court. As a consequence, it has also been completely neglected within academia. Yet, the tu quoque defence is extremely powerful, as not only proven by its recurrent use over time, but also by its ability to turn trials into ‘show-trials’. This delegitimization of international prosecutions not only does impact the memory and reconciliation of war-torn communities, but also weakens the edifice of international criminal law.

‘The Tu Quoque Argument as a Defence to International Crimes, Prosecution or Punishment,’ written by Sienho Yee in 2004 is the only existing in-depth treatment of the defence. Departing from a critique of Yee’s theorization, this article attempts to fill the scholarly lacuna that exists around tu quoque. It departs from a critique of Yee’s theorization and questions whether the defence can be legally legitimate. The article concludes that the defence is legally void, but international criminal tribunals and academia must not disregard its underlying argument because of its political pertinence.

Keywords

international criminal lawinternational tribunalsshow-trialstu quoque defencevictor’s justice
Type
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 315 - 331
Copyright
© Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2019 

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Footnotes

*

MA in International Security at Sciences Po, Paris.

References

1 ‘Case von Weizsaecker, et al. (Ministries Case)’ (1949) XIV Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, at 314–21 (hereinafter TWC).

2 Ibid.

3 Yee, S., ‘The Tu Quoque Argument as a Defence to International Crimes, Prosecution or Punishment’, (2004) 3 ChinJIntLaw 87, at 93.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., at 87.

5 K. Heller, The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (2011), at 297.

6 Ibid., at 298.

7 Prosecutor v. Kupreškić et al., Judgement, Case No. IT-95-16-T, T.Ch, 14 January 2000, at paras. 515–17.

8 Harhoff, F., ‘Tu Quoque Principle’, in Cassese, A. (ed.), The Oxford Companion to International Criminal Justice (2009), at 553Google Scholar. See also Saunders, K., ‘Informal Fallacies in Legal Argumentation’, (1993) 44 South Carolina Law Review 343, at 373Google Scholar.

9 Yee, supra note 3, at 387. See also Heller, supra note 5, at 298.

10 R. Wilson, Writing History in International Criminal Trials (2011), at 157.

11 Ibid., at 156.

12 R. Provost, International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (2004), at 226–7. See also M. Bassiouni, Crimes Against Humanity (2011), at 634–7. See also R. Cryer, Prosecuting International Crimes (2005), at 199–202.

13 Yee, supra note 3.

14 Ibid., at 124.

15 Ibid., at 104.

16 J. Vergès, De la stratégie judiciaire (1968).

17 D. Zolo, Victor’s Justice: From Nuremberg to Baghdad (2009), at ix. See also J. Klabbers, International Law (2013), at 218. See also Bassiouni, M., ‘The Perennial Conflict between International Criminal Justice and Realpolitik’, (2006) 22 Georgia State University Law Review 541, at 543–4Google Scholar. T. Isaacs and R. Vernon (eds.), Accountability for Collective Wrongdoing (2011), at 5.

18 Kupreškić, supra note 7, at para. 518.

19 Bassiouni, supra note 17, at 555.

20 Heller, supra note 5, at 369.

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24 G. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance (2000), at 8. See also N Onishi, ‘Decades after War Trials, Japan Still Honors a Dissenting Judge’, The New York Times, 31 August 2007, available at www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/world/asia/31memo.html.

25 R. Pal, International Military Tribunal For The Far East Dissentient Judgment of Justice Pal (1999), at 21–4.

26 Ibid., at 21.

27 Platone, la Repubblica (1997), at 338e–9a.

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30 Zolo, supra note 17, at xii.

31 Ibid.

32 B. Röling, ‘The Law of War and the National Jurisdiction Since 1945’, (1960) 100 RdC 323, at 389.

33 Aikin, S., ‘Tu quoque argument and the relevance of hypocrisy’, (2008) 28 Informal Logic 155, at 157CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Saunders, supra note 8, at 344.

35 Bassiouni, supra note 12, at 634. See also Provost, supra note 12, at 227.

36 Yee, supra note 3, at 92.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., at 97–100.

39 Röling, supra note 32, at 389.

40 Yee, supra note 3, at 95.

41 Ibid., at 100–13.

42 Ibid., at 96.

43 Bassiouni, supra note 12, at 634. Cassese, supra note 8, at 449.

44 24 El Diario del Juicio (5 November 1985), at 5.

45 30 El Diario del Juicio (17 December 1985), in Garzon Valdes, E., ‘El Terrorismo de Estado’, (1989) 65 Revista de Estudios Políticos 35Google Scholar, at 43 (translation by the author).

46 A. Von Knieriem, The Nuremberg Trials (1959), at 312.

47 Yee, supra note 3, at 99.

48 Kupreškić, supra note 7, at para. 511.

49 Cassese, supra note 8, at 553.

50 Heller, supra note 5, at 298.

51 Yee, supra note 3, at 92.

52 Kupreškić, supra note 7, at para. 515.

53 Ibid., at para. 32.

54 Ibid., at para. 60.

55 Art. 1 1949 Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field, 75 UNTS 31. See also Kupreškić, supra note 7, at para. 517. The judgment also emphasized that the tu quoque plea had never been accepted by the post-Second World War tribunals. In particular, the judges referred to the High Command case from the NMTs, where it was stated that ‘under general principles of law, an accused does not exculpate himself from a crime by showing that another has committed a similar crime, either before or after the commission of the crime by the accused’. (‘Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb et al’ (1948) XI TWC, at 481, hereafter: High Command Case). On several occasions NMT defendants had invoked the tu quoque plea. Besides the aforementioned Ministries (Ministries Case, supra note 1, at 317) and High Command (High Command Case, at 482) cases, the defence was also invoked in the Einsatzgruppen (‘Trial of Otto Ohlendorf et al’ (1948) IV TWC, at 467) and the Hostage case. In the latter two cases the defendants claimed that they could not be convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes because of the civilian deaths caused by the Allies’ bombings. The NMT rejected their arguments in the Hostage case (‘Trial of Wilhelm List et al’ (1948) XI TWC, at 1317, in Heller, supra note 5, at 298). In point of fact, in its judgment on the 27 October 1948, the High Command tribunal recognized a limited use to tu quoque as a mitigating element in reference to Otto Woehler. Woehler, who served as Commander in Chief of the 8th Army, stood accused of using prisoners of war for the construction of field positions in the combat area. The NMT declared that similar use of German prisoners of war from the Allies constituted a factor in mitigation, but not in defence (High Command Case, at 684).

56 Provost, supra note 12, at 229.

57 Cryer, supra note 14, at 199. See also Yee, supra note 3, at 113–23.

58 Yee, supra note 3, at 100.

59 H. Hansen, ‘Fallacies’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015), available at plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies/.

60 Yee, supra note 3, at 100.

61 Röling, supra note 32, at 393.

62 Yee, supra note 3, at 94, mentions the possibility of tu quoque as a defence to selective prosecution in reference to the use of the plea in national courts. Yet, he does not investigate it when pondering the validity of tu quoque as a defence to prosecution.

63 W. Kaleck, Double Standards: International Criminal Law and the West (2015), at 2.

64 Ibid., at 7.

65 Ibid.

66 Heller, supra note 5, at 296.

67 Kaleck, supra note 63, at 56.

68 Ibid., at 8.

69 A.P. Rubin, ‘International Crime and Punishment’, (Fall 1993) 34 NI 73, at 74, in Cryer, supra note 12, at 194.

70 Kaleck, supra note 63, at i.

71 M. Koskenniemi, ‘Between impunity and show trials’, (2002) 6 MPIL 1, at 1.

72 Kaleck, supra note 63, at 49.

73 Ibid., at i.

74 Heller, supra note 5, at 296.

75 Cassese, supra note 8, at 700.

76 Yee, supra note 3, at 94.

77 Prosecutor v. Delalić et al., Judgement, Case No. IT-96-21-A, A. Ch., 20 February 2001, at para. 602.

78 Kaleck, supra note 63, at 49.

79 Ibid., at 19. See also Moghalu, supra note 29, at 21.

80 Koskenniemi, supra note 71, at 9.

81 Nobuko, K., ‘The Tokyo Trials and British-Japanese reconciliation’, in Dobson, H. and Nobuko, K. (eds.), Japan and Britain at War and Peace (2009), at 86Google Scholar.

82 Ibid., at 82.

83 Ibid.

84 Vinjamuri, L., ‘The International Criminal Court and the Paradox of Authority’, (2016) 79 Law&ContempProbs 275Google Scholar, at 277.

85 Yee, supra note 3, at 100.

86 Provost, supra note 12, at 234.

87 Ibid., at 235.

88 Yee, supra note 3, at 124

89 Cryer, supra note 12, at 202.

90 Röling, supra note 32, at 390. See also Knieriem, supra note 46, at 312; Harhoff, supra note 8, at 710; T. Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (1992), at 409; Kaleck, supra note 63, at 14; M. Scharf and G. McNeal, Saddam on Trial (2006), at 74.

91 ‘Trial of K Doenitz’, Judgement International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1 October 1946, 1 IMT 171, at 310–15.

92 Scharf and Mc Neal, supra note 90, at 74.

93 Cryer, supra note 12, at 229.

94 F. Biddle, In Brief Authority (1962), at 452.

95 Taylor, supra note 90, at 409.

96 ‘Trial of K Doenitz’, supra note 91, at 313.

97 Knieriem, supra note 46, at 317.

98 As opposed to a case of tu/nos quoque, it is also possible to read the judgment so that judges were persuaded by the sources of law argument, yet from Biddle’s memoirs (see Biddle, supra note 94) it clearly transpires that the judgment was guided by a moral tension and worries about blunt incoherence, rather than by a recognition of the development of international customary law.

99 See, e.g., the treatment of those accused of the Katyn massacre at Nuremberg Trial Proceedings (1946) 7 IMT, at 425–8.

100 Ko, H., ‘Bouhired, the Trial of Djamila’ (1957), in Mikaberidze, A. (ed.), Atrocities, Massacres and War Crimes: An Encyclopedia (2013), at 71–2Google Scholar.

101 A. Chrisafis, ‘I said to Klaus Barbie: I want people to see your human side’, The Guardian, 15 May 2008.

102 Ko, supra note 100, at 71.

103 B. Schroeder, Terror’s Advocate (2007, dvd).

104 Ibid.

105 E. Christodoulidis, ‘Strategies of Rupture’, (2009) 20 Law Critique 1, at 3.

106 Terror’s Advocate, supra note 103.

107 Christodoulidis, supra note 105, at 10.

108 G. Arnaud and J. Vergès, Pour Djamila (1961).

109 Ko, supra note 100, at 72.

110 Christodoulidis, supra note 105, at 4–10.

111 Ibid.

112 Ibid., at 6.

113 G. Binder, ‘Representing Nazism: Advocacy and Identity at the Trial of Klaus Barbie’, (1988) 98 YJIL 1321, at 1322.

114 Terror’s advocate, supra note 103.

115 Christodoulidis, supra note 105, at 5.

116 ‘Barbie denies sending Jews to their deaths’, The Guardian, 4 July 2008, available at www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/jul/04/5.

117 Christodoulidis, supra note 105, at 6.

118 Ibid.

119 Ibid., at 8.

120 S. Holland, ‘Jacques Verges: Barbie’s lawyer is a mystery man’, UPI, 16 May 1987, available at www.upi.com/Archives/1987/05/16/Jacques-Verges-Barbies-lawyer-is-a-mystery-man/8993548136000/.

121 Christodoulidis, supra note 105, at 7.

122 Binder, supra note 113, at 1328.

123 Ibid., at 1341.

124 Ibid., at 1361.

125 Ibid., at 1381.

126 Chrisafis, supra note 101.

127 Binder, supra note 113, at 1346.

128 I. Kant, La religione entro i limiti della sola ragione (1980), at 32–4. See also K. Jaspers, Il male radicale (2011), at 88.

129 See, e.g., Isaacs and Vernon supra note 17.

130 G. Orwell, Animal Farm (1987), at 192.