CYIL Vol. 7, 2016

PETR VÁLEK CYIL 7 ȍ2016Ȏ Mission in Kosovo in 2007 and in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in 2004. He also served in the Czech Army. Mr. Válek studied at the Charles University Law School in Prague, where he received both his Master’s degree and Ph.D. at the J. W. Goethe University Law School in Frankfurt am Main, and at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor where he gained an LL.M. degree. 1. Introduction In 2015 the international community commemorated the 70th anniversary since the establishment of the International Military Tribunal (hereinafter, the “Nuremberg Tribunal”) by the London Agreement. 1 The International Law Department of the Czech Foreign Ministry honored this anniversary by organizing a seminar on the international criminal justice on December 16, 2015, where the Czech judges from the current international tribunals – Judge Robert Fremr from the International Criminal Court and Judge Ivana Hrdličková from the Special Court for Lebanon – gave their speeches. Since I consider the above-mentioned anniversary quite important both for the development of international law and for the history of my country, I decided to write an article for the Czech Yearbook of Public and Private International Law on the issue of prosecution and punishment of crimes under international law committed during the SecondWorldWar. At the same time, when it comes to choosing a specific topic, I have to admit that a coincidence played a role too. In order to prepare a memo on the legal status of the remains of an SS-Ober- gruppenführer , who died in the last days of the Second World War outside of Prague, I decided to find out whether there are any records on this individual in the archive of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (hereinafter, the “Commission”). These records are located in the UN archives in New York, where they are not easily accessible. Fortunately, copies of the records of this archive were made by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. 2 Thanks to its helpful staff and my colleague at the Czech Mission to the UN, I received a package of documents indicating that this particular individual was put on the list of war criminals by several States, including Czechoslovakia. When studying these documents, I came across a file that was not entirely relevant to my inquiry; however, I thought that its contents should be published in order to provide a concrete example of the work of the Commission and, furthermore, present the contribution of Czech lawyers to the documentation of Shoah . The file concerned the “Czechoslovak charges against German war criminals” related to the 1 The Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis, signed in London on 8 August 1945. In Czechoslovakia, the London Agreement was published under No. 164/1947 Sb. 2 See the press release of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, available at: https://www.ushmm. org/information/press/press-releases/museum-makes-united-nations-war-crimes-archive-public.

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