Our staff member Julia Klaus recently published some exciting findings from her research on the history of international criminal law in the Journal of the History of International Law (Volume 27, Issue 3, 2025). Her article is titled: ‘The Right of Existence of Peoples as Independent Nations: Raphael Lemkin, the Tokyo Tribunal, and Aggression’.
The article sheds light on a previously little-known connection between Raphael Lemkin – known for his seminal work on the concept of genocide – and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Tribunal) in 1947. Based on newly discovered archival materials, Julia Klaus shows how Lemkin worked on the legal definition of war of aggression and juggled legal-philosophical considerations between natural law and pragmatism. These genuinely new insights contribute to a deeper understanding of Lemkin’s multifaceted contributions to international law and remind us of the core ideas of the prosecution of aggression under international criminal law.
Link to the article: https://brill.com/view/journals/jhil/27/3/article-p319_1.xml
A self-archived author’s version is available here:https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5574574