The 1925 Geneva Protocol: China’s CBW Charges Against Japan at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (2017)
Guillemin, Jeanne (Author)
Springer International
Pages: 273-286
Publication date: 2017
Language: English
The 1925 Geneva Protocol, which bans the wartime use of chemical and also biological weapons, was an emphatic reaction to the use of chemical weapons in World War I, but legal institutions that would sanction violations of the treaty have evolved only with difficulty. An important example of a legal failure to support the protocol occurred at the 1946–1948 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), just when it might be expected that Imperial Japan would be charged for its chemical and biological warfare (CBW) waged against China from the late 1930s into World War II. In 1937, the Chinese officially presented its first complaints to the League of Nations about Japan’s battlefield use of chemical weapons (mustard gas, phosgene and tear gases) against defenseless Chinese troops and civilians. In addition, in early 1941 and after, China accused Japan of launching plague attacks against key Chinese cities, killing hundreds and terrorizing thousands. None of these accusations, although supported by evidence, brought about serious international recriminations for Japan. Once World War II ended, China expected to revive these charges at the IMTFE in Tokyo. Instead, under the influence of a few key figures in US military intelligence, the trial’s International Prosecution Section (IPS) deleted the Chinese charges and for decades Japan’s infraction were lost to history. Analysis of this legal failure points to the obstacles posed by growing Cold War antagonisms between the United States and the Soviet Union, which prompted a general American retreat from prosecuting Japan, its new democratic ally in East Asia, as well as the internal processes at the IPS that favored more blatant incidents of Japanese wartime aggression—such as the well-documented 1937 “Rape of Nanjing” and abuses of Allied prisoners of war. After the silence imposed at the IMTFE, chemical and biological weapons proliferated with few restraints until the Cold War ended in 1992. At the same time, the international framework for war crimes prosecution greatly changed with greater attention put on crimes against civilians. Yet, lacking precedent, international readiness to legally sanction violations of the Geneva Protocol—as with the 2013 and 2017 murders of Syrian civilians with nerve gas—remains nearly as ambiguous as it was in 1946.
...MoreBook Bretislav Friedrich; Dieter Hoffmann; Jürgen Renn; Florian Schmaltz; Martin Wolf (2017) One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences.
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