New York - Telford Taylor, who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and helped to lay the foundation for the principle that governments must be held accountable for mistreating their citizens, died at the weekend, aged 90.
Mr Taylor, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, suffered a series of strokes earlier this month. He died in New York. At the close of the second World War, the victorious Allies - the US, Soviet Union, Britain and France - captured Hermann Goering and 20 other leading Nazis and set up the tribunal in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, southern Germany.
Mr Taylor was a principal assistant at the trial. Promoted to brigadier general, he then became chief prosecutor when nearly 200 more Nazis - death squad members, industrialists and others - were tried in a dozen subsequent trials.
At a trial of doctors and scientists accused of brutal medical experiments, Mr Taylor said the court had the obligation to "set forth with conspicuous clarity the ideas and motives which moved these defendants to treat their fellow men as less than beasts".