At the beginning of 2026, Salomėja Zaksaitė, Senior Research Fellow at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, together with Benas Lastauskas, published an article in the international journal Journal of “Cultural Analysis and Social Change” entitled “Organisational Model of the Nuremberg Trials: Between Law, History and Criminology”.

Although the Nuremberg Trials are widely praised for establishing the principle of individual criminal responsibility for international crimes, the article also discusses their potential negative consequences, including the risk of victors’ justice, the selective enforcement of international law, and the “whitewashing” of the true culprits of the Second World War. The trials were conducted by the victorious Allied powers, which raised concerns about the influence of power and political interests on the judicial process. These courts may have been used to justify the actions of the victors and to consolidate their post-war dominance.

In the publication, the authors conclude that the organisation of the Nuremberg Trials was primarily a political rather than a legal project, in which law was chosen as a means to achieve political ends. The very fact that political agreements excluded the legality of the victorious states’ wartime actions from evaluation during the proceedings demonstrates a departure from one of the fundamental principles of the Western legal tradition — that politics should be subordinate to law (and not the other way around). The article notes that such a critique of the Nuremberg Trials, grounded in the spirit of critical criminology, may be “reversed” and applied to (international) criminal law as a whole.

The article is available in English here.