The Webb Draft Judgment
“The Webb Draft Judgment” refers to a 658-page judgment that Sir William F. Webb, the member for Australia and the president of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, 1946-48), drew up as an alternative to the judgment produced by the IMTFE majority, since he was unable to agree with his fellow justices “on the law and on the method of approach to the ascertainment of the facts.” At the end of the day, however, Webb withdrew his judgment and supported the majority’s for the stated reason that the two were, after all, “in most matters… to the same effect.”1 In reality, not only did there remain a wide gap between the two but also Webb’s was vastly superior to the majority opinion in terms of its reasoning and case analyses.2 The Webb Draft Judgment, in this regard, is a historical missed opportunity; the assessment of the IMTFE in the post-trial phase would have been different from what is generally known today had his draft judgment been adopted as the decision of the Tribunal.
The original of the Webb Draft Judgment is deposited at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, Australia, as part of the “Papers of Sir William Flood Webb.”3 WCDI obtained a digital copy from the Australian War Memorial in order to produce a text-searchable version. On the WCDI’s project website, the digital copy can be viewed alongside the text-searchable transcription.
Sir William F. Webb, formerly chief justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland and a justice of the High Court of Australia. Prior to his appointment to the IMTFE, Webb served thrice in 1943-45 as chairman of a commission of inquiry appointed by the Government of Australia to investigate wartime atrocities by the Japanese military forces in the Pacific theater. The reports he produced and the evidence he gathered in those years were widely used at the postwar trials of Japanese war criminals by the Australian and other Allied authorities.
NARA
About this project
David Gustavsen was the chief developer of this project. Lewis Okashimo, Peter Bushell, Lori Mikasa, and Lauren Hauck, as well as Gustavsen himself, undertook the transcription of the Webb Draft Judgment using TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). TEI is a standard for encoding texts in digital form, primarily used in the Humanities and Social Sciences, allowing for greater specificity and precision than standard HTML encoding. It provides guidelines for structuring and representing texts, enabling searchable and machine-readable digital texts. TEI promotes interoperability, collaboration, and the development of digital tools for academic research.
- Webb articulated these observations regarding the majority opinion in the foreword of “The Separate Opinion of the President of the Tribunal, Sir William Flood Webb (The Member for Australia),” a brief separate opinion that he made public at the end of the IMTFE proceedings. Justice Webb’s separate opinion consists of a small selection of excerpts from his 658-page draft judgment, including a discussion of Emperor Hirohito’s culpability. ↩
- The majority opinion, which was adopted as the judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, can be read in various print and online publications. A version suited for researchers would be the one contained in Neil Boister and Robert Cryer (eds.), Documents on the Tokyo International Military Tribunal: Charter, Indictment, and Judgments (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 71-628. This publication also contains five separate opinions, one of which being President Webb’s separate opinion (mentioned in footnote 1 above). ↩
- The reference number of the Webb Draft Judgment at the Australian War Memorial is 3DRL 2481 - Series 2 (5 wallets). A guide to the papers of Sir William F. Webb can be found at https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/accessing-records-at-the-memorial/findingaids/private/webb.↩