Radhabinod Pal

Radhabinod Pal was born on 27 January 1886 in the village of Salimpur, Kushtia, in what was then the undivided Nadia district of Bengal Presidency, British India (now Bangladesh). He came from a Bengali Hindu Vaishnavite family. After passing his Entrance Examination in 1903 and his F.A. Examination in 1905 with distinction at Rajshahi College, he earned a BA Honors in Mathematics in 1907 and an MA in 1908 from Presidency College, Calcutta. Before obtaining his BL degree in 1911, he worked as a clerk in the Allahabad Accountant General Office. He then taught mathematics at Ananda Mohan College in Mymensingh while also practicing law at the Mymensingh Bar. In 1920, he earned an LLM from Calcutta University, placing first in the first class. He later moved to Calcutta to build a career at the High Court. He also studied mathematics and constitutional law at Presidency College and the Law College of the University of Calcutta.

Pal played a major role in drafting the Indian Income Tax Act of 1922. In 1927, the British Government of India appointed him a legal advisor. From 1923 to 1936, he served as a professor at the Law College of the University of Calcutta. He became a judge of the Calcutta High Court in 1941 and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta in 1944. In 1946, he was asked to represent British India as a judge on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Tokyo Trials. During deliberations with judges from ten other countries, Pal strongly criticized the prosecution’s use of the conspiracy concept regarding pre-war decisions by Japanese officials. He argued that the tribunal should not apply the new categories of Class A war crimes—waging aggressive war (crimes against peace)—and crimes against humanity retroactively, a principle known as nulla poena sine lege. Because of this, he dissented from the guilty verdicts for defendants charged with Class A war crimes. His reasoning also influenced the judges from the Netherlands and France, who issued their own dissenting opinions. However, under tribunal rules, verdicts and sentences were decided by a majority vote.

In his dissent, Pal acknowledged that “the evidence is still overwhelming that atrocities were perpetrated by the members of the Japanese armed forces against the civilian population of some of the territories occupied by them as also against the prisoners of war.” Yet he questioned the tribunal’s legitimacy, arguing that retribution, not impartial justice, drove its rulings. He concluded that each accused should be found not guilty on every charge. Pal did not claim this verdict was legally correct, but he argued that the United States had clearly provoked Japan into war, citing the Hull note as an example. He wrote that “questions of law are not decided in an intellectual quarantine area” and that the world in which disputes arise cannot be ignored. He called the trial a “sham employment of legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge.” He also believed the exclusion of Western colonialism and the U.S. use of the atom bomb from the list of crimes, along with the absence of judges from defeated nations, showed the tribunal’s failure to offer anything beyond victors’ retaliation. Pal wrote that the Tokyo Trials were an exercise in victor’s justice, with the Allies equally culpable for strategic bombings of civilians. Despite his personal views on Japan, he dissented to uphold what he saw as absolute truth and justice. He was not alone among Indian jurists; one prominent Calcutta barrister described the tribunal as “a sword in a wig.” Fear of American nuclear power was widespread internationally after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The American occupation of Japan ended in 1952, after Tokyo signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty and accepted the Tokyo trials’ verdict. With the occupation’s end, a ban on publishing Pal’s 1,235-page dissent was lifted, and Japanese nationalists later used it to argue against the trials’ legitimacy. Pal served on the United Nations’ International Law Commission from 1952 to 1966. He died on 10 January 1967. Monuments dedicated to him stand at the Yasukuni Shrine and the Kyoto Ryozen Gokoku Shrine.