After the Holocaust, top-ranking Nazis and collaborators were prosecuted at hundreds of trials in countries that German forces had occupied during World War II. There was also an international tribunal led by the four Allied nations: the US, the UK, France, and the Soviet Union, known as the Nuremberg Trial or the International Military Tribunal.

Despite these efforts, however, historian Mary Fulbrook, in Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, documents the “minuscule number of heavy punishments meted out to a very few perpetrators of genocide.” Law professor Michael Bazyler comments, “Whatever justice was dispensed at Nuremberg and thereafter is overshadowed by the massive impunity afforded to hundreds of thousands of German, Austrian, and other perpetrators who were never called to account for their deeds.”

Why did massive impunity occur? The post-Holocaust world had little sympathy for the victims and thus little will to punish the perpetrators, writes historian Donald McKale. When Germany became a desired ally in the Cold War, many convicted perpetrators had their sentences shortened, commuted, or amnestied. In fact, many of those same convicted police officers, judges, and other officials returned to their former positions, and they had little motivation to reckon with the murders of millions of innocent victims.

But a path had begun at Nuremberg in 1945, and in the decades since the end of the war, efforts have expanded to end impunity for the core international human rights crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression.

In the 1990s, the United Nations established ad hoc international tribunals to prosecute leading perpetrators in the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. In 2002, the permanent International Criminal Court began to adjudicate individuals for the four core crimes. Today, universal jurisdiction is also widely used, which allows accused perpetrators to be prosecuted in national courts almost anywhere in the world, regardless of where the crimes occurred or the nationality of the accused or the victims.

The Eurasia Group, which evaluates geopolitical issues around the world, has released its Atlas of Impunity, a statistical assessment of impunity as “the exercise of power without accountability, which becomes the commission of crimes without punishment.”

The Atlas assesses impunity in 163 countries on the following dimensions:

• unaccountable governance,
• human rights abuse,
• conflict and violence,
• economic exploitation, and
• environmental degradation.

Countries are scored from 0 to 5. Countries with the highest impunity, that is, crimes that escape accountability, score closer to 5; those with the lowest impunity score near 0. 

The US is near the median and ranks worse than both Hungary and Singapore because of impunity for human rights crimes and conflict and violence. Predictably, the Nordic countries do the best, while the worst countries where crimes go unpunished are Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar, all places wracked with violence.

The cost of impunity is devastating. Failing to hold perpetrators of human rights crimes accountable denies victims' rights to justice and redress; fails to provide accurate historical documentation; allows perpetrators to continue their heinous acts; and subverts the rule of law for entire societies.