Today, 6th August, is a historic day. It is the day our World experienced the first Atomic Bombing. On this day in 1945, the first ever atomic bomb to be used in a war, was dropped on the city of Hiroshima in Japan.
And today, 6th August, 2010, is made even more historic because the UN Secretary General, and the US Ambassador to Japan are attending the Annual Atomic Bomb Memorial Ceremony in Hiroshima, Japan, for the first time ever. Let’s hope that this is a step in the direction of ‘world without nuclear weapons’.
It is the most challenging situations that bring out the greatest qualities in man. After the war, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trials, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal or simply as the Tribunal, was convened on May 5, 1946 to try the leaders of the Empire of Japan for three types of crimes.
General Douglas MacArthur - the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, appointed a panel of eleven judges, nine from the nations that signed the Instrument of Surrender. Justice Radhabinod Pal representing British India, was the only one out of 11 Allied justices who handed down a not guilty verdict for Japan’s top wartime leaders.
In colonizing parts of Asia, Japan had merely aped the Western powers, he said. He rejected the charges of crimes against peace and humanity as ex post facto laws, and wrote in a long dissent that they were a “sham employment of legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge.”
“I would hold that each and every one of the accused must be found not guilty of each and every one of the charges in the indictment and should be acquitted of all those charges,” Judge Pal wrote of the 25 Japanese defendants, who were convicted by the rest of the justices.
Judge Pal also described the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States as the worst atrocities of the war, comparable with Nazi crimes. (Quoted from New York Times article Decades After War Trials, Japan Still Honors a Dissenting Judge, Aug. 31, 2007)
According to Wikipedia, "Justice Radhabinod Pal was born in 1886 at a small village called 'Salimpur' under 'Taragunia' union of 'Daulatpur' Upazilla of Kushtia District in present day Bangladesh.
He studied mathematics and constitutional law at Presidency College, Kolkata, and the Law College of the University of Calcutta. He worked as professor at the Law College of the University of Calcutta from 1923 till 1936. He became a judge of Calcutta High Court in 1941 and Vice Chancellor of the University of Calcutta in 1944.
The Indian government installed him as a legal adviser in 1927 and dispatched him to the Tokyo Trials in 1946. Following the war-crimes trials, he was elected to the United Nations' International Law Commission, where he served from 1952 to 1966."
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Links to sources:
New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/31/world/asia/31memo.html
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhabinod_Pal
NHK Documentary on Justice Pal's life:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1585378811406194781#
http://www.blinkvid.com/video/52264/NHK-Special-What-Did-Justice-Radhabinod-Pal-Ask-Tokyo-Trial-Unknown
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