A crime is an act against the law, the law is determined by the will of the people (or at minimum it should), so yeah criminality is subject to opinion. You can be pedantic about whether something is a crime if the current laws don’t match your opinion. But again Nuremberg shows that with a sufficiently large crime the chronology of something becoming a law and the moment a crime was committed is not necessarily important. And at least for the Iraq war I would argue this is very much up for debate.
the law is determined by the will of the people […] so yeah criminality is subject to opinion
this doesn’t matter. a judge only cares about somebody’s actions and what the law says about these actions. jurisprudence isn’t democracy. if the majority of people thinks that someone is guilty it doesn’t matter. what matters is if they violated laws and that can only be evaluated by a professional. so if the majority of people thinks that Bush for example is a war criminal it doesn’t matter if he didn’t violate any laws. of course this goes the other way around too: if 99% of people think that he isn’t a criminal, but he violated laws, he is guilty. the majority of people can’t decide whether someone is guilty or not.
of course the majority of people votes the government which passes laws to it’s voter’s liking, so there’s a big intersection between existing laws and the will of the many. but ultimately the judge doesn’t care about all of this. for them it’s simply “does action violate law?”. outside of this question nothing matters.
A crime is an act against the law, the law is determined by the will of the people (or at minimum it should), so yeah criminality is subject to opinion. You can be pedantic about whether something is a crime if the current laws don’t match your opinion. But again Nuremberg shows that with a sufficiently large crime the chronology of something becoming a law and the moment a crime was committed is not necessarily important. And at least for the Iraq war I would argue this is very much up for debate.
this doesn’t matter. a judge only cares about somebody’s actions and what the law says about these actions. jurisprudence isn’t democracy. if the majority of people thinks that someone is guilty it doesn’t matter. what matters is if they violated laws and that can only be evaluated by a professional. so if the majority of people thinks that Bush for example is a war criminal it doesn’t matter if he didn’t violate any laws. of course this goes the other way around too: if 99% of people think that he isn’t a criminal, but he violated laws, he is guilty. the majority of people can’t decide whether someone is guilty or not.
of course the majority of people votes the government which passes laws to it’s voter’s liking, so there’s a big intersection between existing laws and the will of the many. but ultimately the judge doesn’t care about all of this. for them it’s simply “does action violate law?”. outside of this question nothing matters.