CYIL vol. 7 (2016)

288

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.

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.

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

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.

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.