Anybody reading “Not Guilty: Report of the Commission of Inquiry Into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials” (1937), written by a group chaired by John Dewey, can only be struck by the frequent parallels between Soviet and ICTY principles and court procedure.The Dewey Commission stressed the political and public relations function of the Moscow trials, and the “prearranged scheme” and plan to prove that a single bad man (Trotsky) was guilty. The Commission argued that there was no real effort to establish truth, but merely to prove guilt. It stressed the self-interest of the accusers. The authors have tried to show that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has been a thorough-going servant of NATO,and that the political model of the ICTY fits its history and record very closely.They also try to demonstrate that its judicial practice has continuously violated traditional Western standards almost across the board,even apart from its selective and politicized (and hyper-publicized) indictments and trials. The New York Times’s Marlise Simons, however, has portrayed the Tribunal as a marvel of Western justice, by denying or (mainly) evading the evidence of its political role and judicial malpractice.
- Jovana Pavlovic: ICTY – Power over justice
- Nathan Dershowitz: The doctrine of Joint Criminal Enterprise in the jurisprudence of ICTY