“Before the people of the world,” Spencer Tracy says as the judge in the film Judgment at Nuremberg, “let it be now noted ...that this is what we stand for: justice, truth and the value of a single human being.”

Abby Mann, the Oscar-winning screenwriter whose lines they were, has just died. The superb 1961 film is a fictionalised version of one of the most famous trials in history in which the victors of the Second World War tried the vanquished.

In the film four German judges are tried, accused of crimes against humanity. In the real Nuremberg trials in 1946 the Allies (Britain, America, France and Russia) tried key people in the Nazi regime. These trials helped to establish the idea that horrific breaches of human rights are within the jurisdiction of the world at large. In recent times Senator Augusto Pinochet, the former President of Chile, President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, and Saddam Hussein all faced legal proceedings. The various outcomes of those proceedings (evasion of conviction, death during trial and execution) are less important than that proceedings were brought.

The Nuremberg trials begin a story that has lead to the establishment in 2002 of the International Criminal Court.

The trials were held in the German city of Nuremberg, where the Nazi Party held its annual rallies. In 1945, 22 men were originally indicted. One committed suicide before the trial began. The trial lasted until October 1 1946 when 11 Nazi leaders were sentenced to death by hanging. Three defendants were given life sentences and four jail sentences of between 10 and 20 years. Three men were found not guilty on all counts.

Before these trials it was possible to bring legal proceedings against military people for conventional war crimes (such as torturing prisoners of war) but what had not been done was arraigning the leaders of a nation for crimes against peace and humanity. Four crimes were alleged: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The justification for these newly framed crimes was based on reasoning like that of Robert H. Jackson, the American prosecutor, that they have been “regarded as criminal since the time of Cain”.

The term genocide was coined by Dr Rafael Lemkin, the Jewish-Polish lawyer, in 1943. It means the deliberate attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. His efforts to have it recognised as a crime were successful as it is now against international law and national law such as that of the UK’s Genocide Act 1969. It was not, though, one of the charges levelled against the defendants at Nuremberg because those prosecutions were aimed at crimes against humanity at large.

As is vividly recounted by Professor Richard Overy (in a paper in From Nuremberg to The Hague), the British Government was originally against the idea of trying the Nazis for crimes. Churchill wanted enemy leaders shot after the war and Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, said that the Nazis were so evil “they fall outside and go beyond the scope of any judicial process”. But the Americans and Russians both pressed for a legal “due process” set of trials, and that approach prevailed. The victors would be as bad as the defeated Nazis if they simply relied on a “might is right” principle and shot the losers. It was therefore necessary to have the defendants given the full details of the charges against them and the right to be represented. The trial had to be conducted according to set procedures and for charges to be backed with evidence.

You can fault the trial in many ways. The defendants were being tried for charges that while they were chillingly savage, were not crimes in international law at the time they were committed. The trouble with saying something is a crime after the event is that, in Richard Overy’s great phrase, this “required international law to be written backwards”. Certain crimes, such as bombing civilians, did not make it on to the final charge sheet because the Allies were just as guilty. And while the Soviet judge was sitting in trial at Nuremberg and hearing about the German concentration camps, the Soviet authorities were establishing concentration camps such as the one at Mühlberg to which 122,000 were sent without trial and more than 43,000 were killed or died.

In some ways the Nuremberg trials were political acts. At a dinner for the judges one evening during the trials, a senior Russian legal figure, the Procurator-General attended, and made the judges raise their glasses in a toast. Rather missing the point of a fair trial he bid the judges drink to the swift passage of the defendants “from the courthouse to the grave”.

Yet, for all the flaws and hypocrisies, the Nuremberg trials declared something about international humanity and the rule of law that is reassuring. Like a lot of innovations, the international tribunal at Nuremberg generated remodelled and better versions of itself in the future.

Nuremberg trials website and visits

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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