We often ask, what are the aims of punishment? Or, what is the goal of justice? Less often are we forced to consider: what is the purpose of a trial when the defendant has already been proven, beyond reasonable doubt, guilty? For this, indeed, was the case in the Eichmann trial. Despite Hannah Arendt’s criticism of the “showmanship” of the prosecution, by her own admission, Prosecutor Gideon Hausner’s role was hardly necessary, since “[t]he facts for which Eichmann was to hang had been established ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ long before the trial started, and they were generally known to all students of the Nazi regime.”¹ If a trial merely exists to establish guilt, then it would seem an accusation of monumental showmanship could be levelled against the entire Jerusalem court. But this assumes an overly simplistic view about the nature of justice. Justice not only aims to distinguish the innocent from the guilty, but does so on behalf of the victim. A criminal trial that no longer takes into consideration the victim of a crime is no longer executing justice, merely judgement. Justice is by nature a two way street.

Undoubtedly, Eichmann was not accused of petty crimes, but of war crimes, genocide, and human rights violations on a hitherto unprecedented scale. In a trial such as his, what does jurisprudence demand? Does it, in the manner of a criminal law proceeding, demand narrow and absolute limits; or does it follow after the manner of human rights law, which “embraces… aspirational norms?”² Just as the gravity of the crimes committed was singular, the confluence between these differing approaches needed to be singular as well. Human rights justice necessitated that the unique crimes committed against the Jewish people be promulgated as they had not adequately been by Nuremberg. This, arguably, was Hausner’s goal—to grant Eichmann’s victims a platform whereby their suffering was articulated, acknowledged, and, insofar as was possible, redeemed. As Shoshana Felman puts it, “A criminal is tried not with the aim of vengeance on the part of those whom he has injured, but in order to repair the community that he has endangered by his action.”³ Reparation demanded not only that Eichmann be justly punished for his crimes, but that the Jewish people testify to their collective suffering.

Criminal justice, on the other hand, necessitated that Eichmann receive a fair and impartial trial. As Felman notes, “Unaccountable genocidal injustice is countervailed by a rigorously applied procedure of restoration of strict legal accountability and of meticulous justice.”⁴ The first of these goals was achieved by Hausner, through his (though admittedly occasionally overreaching) determination to have the victims’ voices heard, and the second by the scrupulous dedication of the Jerusalem court to impartial justice. In its own words, “[The Court] cannot allow itself to be enticed into provinces which are outside of its sphere. The judicial process has ways of its own, laid down by law, and which do not change, whatever the subject of the trial may be.”⁵ Within the framework of human rights law, then, Hausner was indeed justified in pursuing a motivation which transcended the simple aims of the trial, provided it did not impede his impartiality and that strict legal accountability was upheld.

^{1 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 52.
2 Allison Marston Danner & Jenny S. Martinez, Guilty Associations: Joint Criminal Enterprise, Command Responsibility, and the Development of International Criminal Law (2005) 93 Cal. L. Rev. 75, 89-90, quoted in David Luban, Julie R. O’Sullivan, and David P. Stewart, International and Transnational Criminal Law. Third edition (New York: Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, 2014), 19.
3 Shoshana Felman, “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 228.
4 Ibid., 217.
5 Prosecutor v. Eichmann, Criminal Case No. 40/61, Judgement (Israel: District Court of Jerusalem, 1961), quoted in David Luban, Julie R. O’Sullivan, and David P. Stewart, International and Transnational Criminal Law. Third edition (New York: Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, 2014), 19.}