Virtual Tribunals Initiative

Virtual Tribunals, a shared initiative at Stanford University between the Center for Human Rights and International Justice and Stanford University Libraries, seeks to make all international criminal tribunal records available and accessible in perpetuity.  

After the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was convened. There, the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany would be tried for their crimes. Nuremberg was neither the first war crimes tribunal nor even the first such proceeding in the aftermath of World War II. However, Nuremberg was the first war crimes trial broadcast on a global scale, intending to help the world understand why such a war was fought, while holding individual defendants responsible. 

The proceedings and judgment of Nuremberg are well known to historians, and their outlines persist in public consciousness. The same cannot be said for some of the more recent tribunals that have been held in the aftermath of conflicts throughout the world. These trials have been held within temporary, ad hoc institutions, created for investigating and judging a specific set of atrocities, which have closed on completion of their duty. Thereafter some records have been archived, while others have gone missing or been destroyed. The records that do survive are sometimes exclusively on paper, accessible only on-site at archives, making them largely off-limits to readers and researchers, and virtually inaccessible to the public. This means that there is a considerable risk that the record of these tribunals ⎯ and the horrors they sought to uncover ⎯ will disappear from literature and memory.

In 1999 David Cohen created the University of California, Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center to house the records that he had collected of the many national war crimes programs that prosecuted German and Japanese defendants throughout Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions in the aftermath of World War II. Compilation and analysis of these records showed their importance both as artifacts of history and as sources of precedent for contemporary and future international justice endeavors. This led to the design and implementation of a long-term preservation and access strategy for these vital records, whereby the Center acquired microfilm copies of some of the records and established partnerships with record-holding archives around the world so as to open them to the public. The Center also grew to have a more operational role, providing support for institutions, such as the UN Special Panels for Serious Crimes in East Timor, which lacked the capacity to preserve and make accessible the digital content of their proceedings.  

By 2014, the War Crimes Studies Center had migrated across San Francisco Bay and become the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University. There, the new Center forged a partnership with Stanford Libraries and the University Librarian, Michael Keller, to create the Virtual Tribunals initiative. It was envisaged that the Virtual Tribunals platform might facilitate free access to the single most comprehensive database of archival material from the tribunals and truth commissions established in the wake of mass atrocities around the globe. The search function in the Virtual Tribunal would make the discovery of multilingual and multimedia materials far easier and more efficient for both legally trained and non-expert users, so these historic collections could have a much wider impact on educational institutions and lay-audiences, including populations directly affected by conflict or living in relevant diaspora communities. In addition, as noted above, the collection would provide a home for digital documentation – and in some cases original documents – that would otherwise be at risk because of a lack of infrastructure and expertise or from political interference. Virtual Tribunals would ensure this record preservation and access by digitizing paper and microfilm records, creating searchable metadata within the records, storing the files on the Stanford Digital Repository, and then displaying and curating the records on Spotlight, an open-source software platform. Together, this would permit the creation of a comprehensive database of records from tribunals around the globe and throughout history, rendered searchable through a single online portal. 

The results have been outstanding. The reputation of Virtual Tribunals for excellence and integrity has led to Stanford working with contemporary international tribunals, national archives, and government institutions to preserve hundreds of thousands of vital records. The collection of Virtual Tribunals incorporates significant portions of records from World War II-era tribunals. These include the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg; the U.S. Army courts of occupied Germany, held principally at Dachau; and the U.S. Army courts held in occupied Japan and in the liberated Philippines. These are joined by the records of two modern tribunals, the Special Panel for Serious Crimes, East Timor, and, from June 2024, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

In nearly all instances, display via Virtual Tribunals is the first time that these records have been made available to readers and researchers in such an accessible and searchable form, offering tremendous new opportunities for scholarship. It is the hope of Virtual Tribunals that the digitization and display of these records will allow a much richer and more nuanced view of the history of the trials, of the atrocities that they chronicled and assessed, and of the people of post-conflict societies in whose name investigations and accountability were pursued.