The 1956 Japanese War Crimes Trials in China
Historical Origins of International Criminal Law: Volume 2 Morten Bergsmo, CHEAH Wui Ling and YI Ping (editors) E-Offprint: LING Yan, “The 1956 Japanese War Crimes Trials in China”, in Morten Bergsmo, CHEAH Wui Ling and YI Ping (editors), Historical Origins of International Criminal Law: Volume 2, FICHL Publication Series No. 21 (2014), Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, Brussels, ISBN 978-82-93081-13-5. First published on 12 December 2014. This publication and other TOAEP publications may be openly accessed and downloaded through the website www.fichl.org. This site uses Persistent URLs (PURL) for all publications it makes available. The URLs of these publications will not be changed. Printed copies may be ordered through online distributors such as www.amazon.co.uk. © Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2014. All rights are reserved. 27 ______ The 1956 Japanese War Crimes Trials in China LING Yan* 27.1. Introduction It is well known that after the Second World War, Class A Japanese war criminals were prosecuted before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (‘IMTFE’). Parallel to the Tokyo Trials, Class B and C Japanese war crimes cases were also tried by national military courts set up by the Allies at different locations such as Manila, Singapore, Saigon, Khabarovsk, Rabaul, Hong Kong and Batavia. 1 More than 2,000 war crimes suspects were detained for that purpose in China. By the end of the trials in April 1949, the Chinese military courts at 10 locations – Nanjing, Shanghai, Peking, Hankou, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Xuzhou, Jinan, Taiyuan and Taipei2 – had sentenced 145 convicts to death, more than 300 others to imprisonment and acquitted the rest before repatriating them to Japan.3 Due to the breakout of civil war in China soon after the Second World War – that led to a change of government in 1949 – judicial documents such as case files, transcripts and judgments of some war crimes trials went missing or were nowhere to be found.
[Show full text]