Legally speaking, murder is a subset of killing. There are numerous circumstances in which a person is killed in a manner that is not defined as murder. A prisoner being executed or an enemy soldier being shot in combat are examples of a person being killed but not murdered. In Germany during the Nazi regime, the government decided that killing people who belonged to certain groups was not murder. It wasn’t that the victims were being denied access to the courts - it was that the government had said no crime was occurring.
I’m pretty sure ethnic cleansing is a crime…
No, murder is a crime. Ethnic cleansing is a lot of people being killed. Whether or not they were murdered as individuals is a matter of what laws existed when and where the killings occurred.
There’s a difference between things that are immoral and things that are illegal (although many things are both). Consider slavery; everyone now agrees it is immoral. But back in the 1850’s it was quite legal many places in the United States, even though there were already many people arguing it was immoral. Presumedly, if these people had chosen to do so, they could have retroactively declared slavery was a crime in 1870 and prosecuted people who had owned slaves back before the war.
Well, not legally, because US law prohibits ex post facto laws. You can’t, in the US, punish somebody for something that’s legal when the act in question occurs.
My point was that it was said upthread that the trial of key Nazi figures was held to be legal because by signing an unconditional surrender, the German government had in effect thrown itself on the mercy of the allies. My question was, what if the remaining German authorities had simply refused to do so? Would that have diminished the legality of the Nuremberg trials?
Which is one of the points we’re discussing here. As Schnitte pointed out above, the German constitution also prohibits ex post facto laws. But this was circumvented by declaring something an act a crime against humanity, which essentially says that something should have been illegal even if there was no actual law against it.
Right, but what I’m saying is that in effect is still an ex post facto law, because it’s saying something was illegal because we think it should have been illegal when it happened. It retroactively limits the power of the state by saying that there are some actions a state can never legitimately take, and it combines the law, which is a set of regulations and prohibitions unique to a specific government and society, with a kind of universal morality that’s independent of society.
Of course, the Nazis lost World War Two, and the Communists lost in '89, and so the Allies and the West Germans, as the victors, could make the law whatever they wanted and punish whoever they wanted. The ability of the Nazi or Communist states to enforce their own set of laws ended with the fall of those governments.
A principle is not a law, and therefore no one can be convicted under a principle. Rather, principles (in this context) are ways of determining how a law should be applied to a certain situation. I’m open to being proven wrong on these examples, but I recall that a British court case in which an American was denied ownership of an “escaped slave” was determined based on the judge’s reading of a speech in Parliament. Similarly, a SCOTUS case cited a centuries old English judge’s commentary.
Of course, I’m not advocating this approach; I think that the way it was applied in the case of the East German soldiers was unfair. It’s just not without precedent in many modern legal systems.
According to our friend Wikipedia, no peace treaty in the Korean War conflict has been signed to date.
Are they still shooting at each other? They would if they could see each other, but the DMZ is fairly wide and runs across the width of the peninsula. Otherwise? Who can say? Perhaps it would occur that they would still be shooting North Koreans on sight.
Cartooniverse
It’s not quite as bad as “shoot on sight”. While there’s no treaty, there is an armistice agreement in place. This means that neither side is supposed to shoot at the other as long as they don’t violate the terms of the agreement - which basically is “you stay on your side of the line and we’ll stay on ours”. In reality, the North-South border has remained fairly “hot” and there have been numerous incidents of raiding parties crossing the borders and shots being fired.
Aside, Cerowyn, the case of which you’re thinking probably is Somersett’s (more often spelled Somerset’s). But, you have the ruling backwards. The court did not interpret a statute of Parliament. Rather, it ruled that, in the absence of such a statute (positive law), British common law did not recognize the concept of slave ownership. Thus, Somerset’s “owner” could not force his return to America.
BTW, I agree that the treatment of the East German soldiers was unfair. That is, I don’t like the system under which they operated, but law is law.