ary American national security establishment with United Nations-sponsored and administered international bodies such as ICC.
According to Slomanson, "war criminals have been prosecuted at least since the time of the ancient Greeks" (1). Such prosecutions have, however, been aptly characterized as 'victor's justice' because "national justice systems have often proved themselves incapable of being balanced and impartial" (1).
As early as 1934, the League of Nations prepared the first draft convention for the creation of an international criminal court, but it failed of adoption.
According to Janis, an important barrier to the creation of such a tribunal was the belief among international legal jurists and scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries that "international law was a law for states alone . . . it was thought to be antithetical for there to be international legal rights that individuals could assert against states" (253; and see Oppenheim 636-639). In reaction, however, to the plethora of grave atrocities committed during World War II, the 1946 International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg, Germany and Tokyo, Japan established the principle that individual perpetrators of violations of duties imposed by customary international law --e.g. crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity-- could be tried and punished. During the period 1945-1989, various international conventions delineated basic human rights, such as the UN General Assembly's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (dealing with the rights of prisoners of war), and the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951). However, Ward said "the development of the Cold War ultimately stymied the momentum that followed Nuremberg" (1126).
The end of the Cold War brought in its wake other s...