[3] Radhabinod Pal was born in 1886 in the village of Salimpur, Kushtia, then part of undivided Nadia district in Bengal Presidency, British India (present-day Bangladesh) into a Bengali Hindu Vaishnavite family.

In deliberations with judges from 10 other countries, Pal was highly critical of the prosecution's use of the legal concept of conspiracy in the context of pre-war decisions by Japanese officials.

While finding 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", he produced a judgment questioning the legitimacy of the tribunal and its rulings.

He held the view that the legitimacy of the tribunal was suspect and questionable, because the spirit of retribution, and not impartial justice, was the underlying criterion for passing the judgment.

He also noted that "Questions of law are not decided in an intellectual quarantine area in which legal doctrine and the local history of the dispute alone are retained and all else is forcibly excluded.

[7] Judge Pal noted, "I might mention in this connection that even the published accounts of Nanking 'rape' could not be accepted by the world without some suspicion of exaggeration..."[8][better source needed] Furthermore, he believed that the exclusion of Western colonialism and the use of the atom bomb by the United States from the list of crimes, as well as the exclusion of judges from the vanquished nations on the bench, signified the "failure of the Tribunal to provide anything other than the opportunity for the victors to retaliate.

"[9] Pal wrote that the Tokyo Trials were an exercise in victor's justice and that the Allies were equally culpable in acts such as strategic bombings of civilian targets.

When time shall have softened passion and prejudice, when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation, then Justice, holding evenly her scales, will require much of past censure and praise to change places.

The end of the occupation also lifted a ban on the publication of Judge Pal's 1,235-page dissent, which Japanese patriots used as the basis of their argument that the Tokyo trials were biased.

[7][10][11] In academic context, it has since generally been argued that the underlying aim of the trials was to shift blame from Emperor Hirohito to Prime Minister Hideki Tojo as the culprit of the war.

[12][13][14] Psychologist and cultural critic Ashis Nandy argued that Judge Pal's lone dissenting opinion, that the Japanese soldiers were only following orders and that the acts committed by them weren't illegal in an indictable sense, was because of "his long exposure to the traditional laws of India", combined with a sense of "Asian solidarity" within the "larger Afro-Asian context of nationalism".

[18] On 23 August 2007, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe met with Pal's son, Prasanta, in Kolkata, during his day-long visit to the city.