The UN International Criminal Tribunals
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The Statute of the Nuremberg Tribunal said that the court was not bound ‘by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value.’ As the specialists on the subject of international criminal evidence, the late Richard May and Marieke Wierda, have observed,
[a]lthough the trials were adversarial and the parties alone were responsible for calling the evidence, the judges were sitting without a jury, and the common law rules designed to prevent jurors from hearing prejudicial evidence were discarded in favour of a liberal approach akin to that of civil law systems. The result was an expeditious trial of the accused - as required by the Charter - which was completed in ten months and in which issues such as the admissibility of evidence did not take up much time.
The Secretary-General's report accompanying the draft statute of the ICTY said that the judges should adopt rules of procedure and evidence to govern ‘the admission of evidence, the protection of victims and witnesses and other appropriate matters’. Section 3 of Part IV the ICTY RPE, entitled ‘Rules of Evidence’, consists of thirteen distinct provisions. Other Rules concerning evidence appear throughout the RPE. The law of evidence before the tribunals is also comprised of various principles established in the case law.
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