In an article written in 1951, Josef Kunz reflected upon Roscoe
Pound’s view that primitive law aims, before anything else, to establish
peace and guarantee the status quo.1 Kunz was writing at a time
when the world had been through two cataclysmic world wars and
now faced the threat of a third, and he observed that of the two juridical
values, security and justice, security was ‘the lower, but most
basic value’.2 His observation was certainly true of the early experiments
in international criminal law carried out at the International
Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo. Here, security was the
overriding concern, represented by the central charge of ‘crimes
against peace’. For the prosecuting Allied powers in 1945, peace –
even an unjust peace – was infinitely preferable to war, whether
‘just’ or not.