The deputy spoke about the importance of the Nuremberg trials for international law

The Nuremberg trials became a judicial precedent that defined new principles of international justice and consolidated personal responsibility for the most serious crimes. This was stated to Izvestia by Viktor Vodolatsky, first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs. The Tribunal's decisions formed the basis of the modern global legal system and set the standards that have been applied so far. For more information, see the Izvestia article.

Global law and order reform

The Nuremberg Trials turned international law into a universal instrument for the protection of human life and security. The trial became the starting point for a new era in which the international community was given the opportunity to prevent and punish crimes on a global scale.

Viktor Vodolatsky, first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs, Eurasian Integration and Relations with Compatriots, told Izvestia why the Nuremberg Tribunal has become a new milestone in international law.

According to him, the Nuremberg trials marked the beginning of international criminal law, which has been prevailing until now. In all subsequent times, all the regimes that existed on the planet understood that, under any set of circumstances, their crimes would be associated with the crimes of the Nazis, and that a similar tribunal could be repeated anywhere in the world where these crimes were committed, the politician stressed.

— Everything related to the Nuremberg trials is a new milestone in the history of international law. The entire top of Nazi Germany, those who had not committed suicide, were sitting in the dock, and each bore personal responsibility for the deed. The ideology of Nazism was subject to clear formulations that it should no longer be on our planet Earth, because it is the destruction of people," concluded Vodolatsky.

The principle of individual responsibility

The Nuremberg trials were the first court proceedings in which international law recognized the personal responsibility of State leaders for crimes committed. The Court found that high office or the execution of orders do not exclude criminal liability if the acts are directed against humanity, peace or humanitarian law.

The formation of a system of international crimes

The process provided clear legal definitions of key categories of crimes: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. This classification became the basis for the subsequent development of international criminal law and became a model for future tribunals.

New standards of the evidence base

In Nuremberg, for the first time, a large-scale set of evidence was used: documents, personal records of the Reich leadership, newsreels, eyewitness accounts. The complexity of the evidence has set a new standard for international courts and allowed them to form an objective picture of events.

Crimes with no statute of limitations

The recognition of the Holocaust and other mass killings as crimes against humanity has led to the emergence of the principle that such crimes should not be forgotten. This approach has been consolidated in international agreements and has determined the attitude of the world community towards massive human rights violations.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during an interview for the documentary "Nuremberg. Don't complain about the executioner's life," he said that thanks to the Nuremberg Tribunal, it was possible to make sure that the Nazi ideology, party and structures were "banned forever."

"Unfortunately, this decree does not have a statute of limitations for these crimes, <...> parts of the decree are now being significantly tested, very often they are simply violated," the minister concluded.

Vodolatsky added that in Europe, despite the established legal norms, they began to actively support the revival of Nazism — those shoots that were laid in the early 2000s in Ukraine are now metastasizing in Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Everything that was at the Nuremberg Tribunal, the international assessment, is insignificant because they ignore it, deciding to repeat everything that was once conceived in 1933 in Munich.

"What is happening now means that all those norms and rules that were announced at the Nuremberg Tribunal are not fundamental for people like Zelensky, for people like Trump, Macron, Merz and the like,— Vodolatsky explained.

Creation of international institutions

Nuremberg became the starting point for the formation of global justice mechanisms. The Geneva Conventions of 1949, the development of humanitarian law and the establishment of the International Criminal Court are a direct legacy of the Tribunal's legal conclusions.

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