Nuremberg Charter

The Nuremberg Charter, formally the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, was annexed to the London Agreement signed on 8 August 1945 by the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the Provisional Government of France. Nineteen other Allied states later adhered to it. The Charter created the legal framework for the International Military Tribunal (IMT) that sat at Nuremberg from November 1945 to October 1946 to try senior leaders of Nazi Germany.

Article 6 of the Charter set out three categories of offences over which the Tribunal had jurisdiction:

• Crimes against peace — planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression
• War crimes — violations of the laws or customs of war
• Crimes against humanity — murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds

The Charter also rejected several traditional defences. Article 7 denied immunity to heads of state and public officials, and Article 8 held that acting on superior orders did not relieve a defendant of responsibility, though it could mitigate punishment. Article 9 permitted the Tribunal to declare organisations (such as the SS or Gestapo) criminal.

Twenty-two defendants were tried at the main proceeding; twelve were sentenced to death, three acquitted, and the remainder given prison terms. The Charter's principles were affirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 95(I) on 11 December 1946 and later codified by the International Law Commission in 1950 as the Nuremberg Principles.

The Charter is widely regarded as the foundation of modern international criminal law. Its categories of crimes and rejection of sovereign immunity influenced the Tokyo Charter (1946), the Genocide Convention (1948), the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and ultimately the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998). Critics at the time, and since, have argued it applied ex post facto law and reflected victor's justice.