The Nuremburg Judgment
International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals
6 F.R.D. 69 (1946)
In 1945, the Allied nations established the Nuremberg Tribunal to prosecute German officials for crimes against peace, war crimes, and human rights violations committed during World War II, indicting 27 individual defendants under the tribunal's charter. The defendants argued they could not be convicted absent a preexisting law defining their conduct as criminal, that international law traditionally governed the conduct of nations rather than individuals, and that state sovereignty shielded individual government actors from personal prosecution.
Whether individuals may be prosecuted by an international tribunal for war crimes and human rights violations, even when those violations were ordered by their own national government.