11 - International justice and collective security: between pragmatism and principle

Summary

Some years ago, a prominent international scholar stated that “the administration of justice in the Community of States [would] not be complete until a criminal jurisdiction is established to cope with international crimes” and that the “necessity of such a jurisdiction [seemed] to be a fact established without reasonable doubt.”

At the time it was published in 1980, this quote was seen as an expression of idealistic fervor. In the 1980s, and even in the 1990s, the establishment of a permanent international criminal court seemed a long way off, if not impossible. However, international criminal prosecution of serious crimes, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, experienced unprecedented development during the 1990s. The establishment of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia proved to be an important catalyst because it forced the prospect of a permanent court back onto the international agenda. Once this happened, progress was astonishingly swift. Just over five years after the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, 120 nations voted to adopt the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on July 17, 1998, a date that symbolically coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of both the Convention for the Prevention and Sanction of the Crime of Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, two instruments that recognized protection of human rights as the best means for safeguarding peace and security.