The ad hoc tribunals set pacification in the States

For some time the real purpose of the ad hoc tribunals was settling differences between states or, sometimes, among other international entities, things in the lines of small controversies related to the mandataries of the international entities and conflicts that could be seen as mundane as today’s standards when it comes to international matter. It was not until the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II that the tribunals ad hoc were created aimed at resolving criminal cases brought against individuals to address the most serious international crimes, such as genocide, war crimes and Crimes against humanity.

After the trials of Nuremberg and Tokyo, the first international criminal tribunals were established in the 1990s to respond to the atrocities committed during the conflict in former Yugoslavia and the mass killings in Rwanda. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) were created by the Security Council of the UN.

Thereafter, they have made other special courts to try national and international crimes. Examples of these mixed tribunals are set up in Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Timor Leste, Sierra Leone, Cambodia and more recently in Lebanon.

The development of these legal mechanisms is an important component of some post-conflict contexts, since it promotes debate about the need to work for peace and reconciliation in a country or community, against the claims of justice victims of human rights violations. For example, after the World War I where bioweapons were used in the form of poisonous gases and such, it was made completely illegal, a war crime, to use bioweapons, since it attempted against the health of the environment and it didn’t have any kind of control, harming allies and enemies without any kind of liability once these weapons were released.

The arguments in favor of post-armed conflict trials in countries where there were allegations of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity revolve around the need to prevent new crimes of these kind, to demand justice for victims and the community and the need to know the truth about what happened, as a starting point for a future of peaceful coexistence.

The arguments in favor of post-armed conflict trials in countries where there were allegations of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity revolve around the need to prevent that they happen again, because although war is by itself a horrendous event, one can argue that war is a necessary evil, as Woodrow Wilson once said, because one can not know what evils and atrocities are possible to harm or to what extent, unless they show themselves through events such as war, so in that sense, war is necessary in order to make a more peaceful world under the laws that are born during times of war.