On 17 November 2018, the International Nuremberg Principles Academy was invited to participate in an anniversary event entitled “The Present-Day Significance of Nuremberg and Tokyo in Modern International Law”, hosted by the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Tokyo. Dr. Viviane Dittrich, Deputy Director of the Nuremberg Academy, gave a talk on “The Legacies of Nuremberg and Tokyo”, focusing in particular on the legacies of the Nuremberg trial, the Nuremberg Principles and the work of the Nuremberg Academy today. The anniversary event was organized to mark the 70th anniversary of the Tokyo Judgment and the 20th anniversary of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Topics discussed included, inter alia, the legacies of Nuremberg and Tokyo, theories of responsibility by the Prosecution and the Defence at the Tokyo Trial, a comparative legal assessment of Tokyo and Nuremberg and approaches to dealing with the past in Germany and Japan.
The keynote speaker was Judge LIU Daqun (Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals). The speakers (in speaking order) were Professor Yuji Ishida (University of Tokyo), Dr. Viviane Dittrich (International Nuremberg Principles Academy), Professor Yuma Totani (University of Hawaii), Professor David Cohen (Stanford University), Professor Kensuke Shiba (Osaka University of Economics and Law / Tokyo Woman's Christian University) and Professor Hirofumi Hayashi (Kanto Gakuin University).
The event was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) and the German Federal Foreign Office. The event was conducted bilingually, using English-Japanese and Japanese-English simultaneous interpretation, and was open to the public. Approximately 150 persons attended the event.