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| - Seventy-five years after Nazi leaders went on trial at Nuremberg, its spiritual successor the International Criminal Court is facing huge hurdles as it tries to keep the flame of justice alive. The Nuremberg trials set up in Germany in 1945 after World War II laid the foundation for a global criminal justice system for those accused of the worst atrocities that humankind is capable of. Nuremberg's legacy lives on in the Hague-based ICC, which since 2002 has stood as the world's only permanent, independent court for violations like genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. But it can be easy to overlook the fact that when the victorious Allies put 21 top Nazi leaders in the dock on November 20, 1945, the prosecutors held all the aces, experts say. All the defendants were in custody; the Allies had occupied the country and controlled massive amounts of well-documented evidence. Most of all, the Nuremberg trials were pushed by political will, particularly by the United States, for a proper prosecution of Nazi perpetrators. "With these advantages, of course the (Nuremberg) tribunal was successful," Nancy Combs, law professor at the William and Mary Law School in Virginia, told AFP. The ICC by contrast "must conduct its prosecutions without the benefit of any of these advantages," said Combs. Since opening its doors 18 years ago, the ICC has battled to have senior leaders arrested or to prosecute them, including in two cases referred to it by the United Nations Security Council. Former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is still on the run pending an ICC arrest warrant issued in 2010, despite him travelling to other ICC member states who failed to arrest him. Slain Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi's son Seif al-Islam is still believed to be in the North African country, wanted on a 2011 arrest warrant. In the last six years, the court had to drop a crimes against humanity case against Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta, while former Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo and Congolese politician Jean-Pierre Bemba were both acquitted on charges. "ICC prosecutors, like Nuremberg prosecutors want to prosecute high-level leaders but it doesn't have the political backing to gain custody over those suspects or the evidence it needs to convict them," Combs said. However the ICC's biggest headache is that the United States, which was the main backer of the Nuremberg tribunal, has turned against the ICC -- and under the Trump administration intensified its attacks on the court. Since its creation, the US has never formally recognised the court's authority, but the White House took the unprecedented step last month of sanctioning ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and another senior ICC official. At the heart of the dispute are efforts by Bensouda to pursue an investigation into alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan, which could implicate US soldiers. "The attitude of the US towards the ICC has fluctuated over time. But the current attitude of the US towards the ICC is very extreme," said Cecily Rose, assistant professor in international law at Leiden University in the Netherlands. "The highly polarised and divisive character of American domestic politics is very different from the post-WWII era, when the US was a leader with respect to international justice and the Nuremberg trials," she told AFP. "But at the time the US was the 'victor' whereas now it faces the prospect of its own armed services members being investigated and prosecuted by the ICC," she said. Both Rose and Combs stressed however that the very fact the Allies meted out a "victors' justice" also tarnished the Nuremberg tribunal. "Yes, the ICC is struggling and its inadequacies look all the more stark in comparison to the ostensible triumph of Nuremberg," said Combs. "But it is the political contexts that primarily account for Nuremberg's success as well as the ICC's challenges," she said. Law experts, judges and prosecutors however agree that apart from laying a foundation for modern-day criminal tribunals, Nuremberg's other great legacy was the inspiration to pursue justice. That has carried through to the temporary tribunals including those dealing with crimes committed during the war in the former Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide, but more pertinently to the permanent ICC. "When things are tough, we look at Nuremberg and the work of prosecutors like Ben Ferencz," one ICC official told AFP, asking not to be named. The centenarian American lawyer was one of the chief prosecutors at Nuremberg and is still alive. "He is a true source of inspiration that keeps us going," the official said. "He told us it wasn't easy then -- and it's not going to be easy now. But we have to persist," the official said. jhe/dk/kjm
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