Lost justice: double standards toward the application of the Nuremberg principles of medical ethics and international humanitarian law in the 1946-1948 Tokyo trial against Japanese military doctors on the facts of experiments on human beings

The International Tribunal for the Far East was initiated in Tokyo 76 years ago to condemn Japanese militarism and the specific Japanese war criminals involved in the mass deaths in the South-Eastern countries overrun by Japanese forces. Among the war criminals were also military doctors. Despite the passage of time, interest in the trial, which lasted from 1946 to 1948, grows year by year. Interpretation of the event by historians, journalists, and politicians ranges from sharp condemnation of the crimes of Japanese military doctors by analogy with condemnation of the crimes of military doctors in Nazi Germany to attempts to prove the significance of the “atrocious” experiments of Japanese doctors in light of the spread of various pandemics in recent years. The aim of the article is to point out the double standards in the application of the basic international document, the Nuremberg Code, elaborated by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, to the assessment of the criminal activities of Japanese doctors between 1932 and 1945. The research focused on the ethics of medical experiments. Methods used -analysis of domestic and foreign scientific sources, international conventions, archival documents; scientific induction and subsequent scientific reflection. An examination of the Tokyo trials concludes that the decisions by U.S. military commanders and the U.S. government to cover up the war crimes of Japanese physicians, to the detriment of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War and the articles of the Nuremberg Code, were wrongful. Traces the effects of impunity in the postwar activities of military doctors, which influenced the public consciousness of the Japanese and the medical community in particular.