The horrors of the twentieth century are many. While the law limped lamely along, international crimes flourished. The failure of the international community to develop binding norms of international criminal law was glaringly illustrated by the slow pace of various UN committees charged in 1946 with drafting both a code of crimes against the peace and security of mankind and the statutes for an international criminal court. The awareness of the inadequacy of the law and the willingness to do something to enforce such new principles was slow in coming. The right of humanitarian intervention to put a stop to Crimes Against Humanity – even by a sovereign against his own citizens – gradually emerged from the Nuremberg principles affirmed by the United Nations. The Nuremberg trials established that all of humanity would be guarded by an international legal shield and that even a Head of State would be held criminally responsible and punished for aggression and Crimes Against Humanity. As the Nuremberg judges pointed out in 1946, ‘The Hague Convention nowhere designates such practices as criminal, nor is any sentence prescribed, nor any mention made of a court to try and punish offenders.’(1)
On the eve of the twentieth century attempts to regulate warfare in The Hague Conference of 1899, and again in 1907, were constrained by notions of State sovereignty. Indeed if international criminal law is defined as the prosecution of individuals for ‘international crimes’ such as war crimes or Crimes Against Humanity then there was no such law for most of the twentieth century. There is no doubt that international criminal law has developed in recent years. The first forty years after Nuremberg was a period of slow progress in developing international criminal law.
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