The International Court of Justice was brought into being by the Charter of the United Nations (Articles 7(1), 36(3), and 92-96), and by the Statute of the Court which was made an integral part of the Charter; both of which instruments were signed at San Francisco on June 26, 1945. The most important difference between the Statute of the new Court and that of its predecessor, the Permanent Court of International Justice, on which the new Statute was based, was that the new Court was to be one of the “principal organs” of the United Nations. The Charter and the new Statute entered into force on October 24, 1945. After the election of the Court’s first members the new Court met for the first time in the Peace Palace at The Hague on April 1, 1946, under the presidency of Judge Guerrero, with Judge Basdevant as Vice-President.

The provisions relating to the Security Council in the United Nations Charter of 1995 do not look much different from those in the Charter of 1945. Articles 23 and 27 were amended in 1965 to increase the membership of the Security Council from its original eleven to its present fifteen, with a corresponding change from seven to nine votes for the adoption of resolutions. No change was made in the five permanent members’ veto power over substantive matters. Article 109 was amended in 1968 to increase from seven to nine the number of votes in the Security Council needed to complement a two-thirds vote in the General Assembly for the convening of a Charter review conference. Otherwise, c’est la même chose.

Too much has been written lately about the limited approach to human rights at Dumbarton Oaks, the struggle at the San Francisco Conference, and the great flowering of declarations, conventions, covenants and instruments to implement them in the last fifty years. Instead of adding another retelling of these more than twice-told tales, this essay tries to look at the origin of two less known contributions to the law of human rights—the broad nondiscrimination clause which added a more practical meaning to the vague “human rights and fundamental freedoms” phrase; and the bold addition of economic and social rights to the more traditional civil and political rights.

For half a century, the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials and national prosecutions of World War II cases remained the major instances of criminal prosecution of offenders against fundamental norms of international humanitarian law. The heinous activities of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the use of poison gas by Iraq against its Kurdish population are among the many atrocities left unpunished by either international or national courts. Some treaties were adopted that provide for national prosecution of offenses of international concern and, in many cases, for universal jurisdiction; but, with a few exceptions, these treaties were not observed. Notwithstanding the absence of significant prosecutions, an international consensus on the legitimacy of the Nuremberg Principles, the applicability of universal jurisdiction to international crimes, and the need to punish those responsible for egregious violations of international humanitarian law slowly solidified. The International Law Commission, veterans of the Nuremberg and Tokyo proceedings, individuals such as Rafael Lemkin (who advocated the adoption of the Genocide Convention) and a handful of academics (most notably M. Cherif Bassiouni), among others, helped keep alive the heritage of Nuremberg and the promise of future prosecutions of serious violators of international humanitarian law.

Income tax law and human rights law operate in quite separate worlds, but a proposal recently presented to Congress brings them together. The Clinton administration has advocated a tax on certain unrealized capital gains of expatriates and some of its opponents have claimed that it constitutes a violation of human rights law. They evoke the hardships visited on those who fled from Nazi Germany in the 1930s and from the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic more recently. They assert that a similar wrong would be inflicted by this proposed tax on those who surrender United States citizenship. The reaction of this writer is that of Justice Cardozo to the charge that twentieth-century administrative practices are “Star Chamber” procedures: “Historians may find hyperbole in the sanguinary simile.”

On March 29,1995, the following officials of the executive branch of the U.S. Government appeared before the Human Rights Committee at the United Nations to discuss U.S. implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which had entered into force for the United States on September 8, 1992): John Shattuck, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and Conrad K. Harper, the Department’s Legal Adviser; Assistant Attorneys General Deval L. Patrick, Civil Rights Division, and Jo Ann Harris, Criminal Division; and Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs Ada Deer. The same officials, together with other members of the U.S. delegation, appeared again on March 31, 1995, to reply to questions raised by the Committee.