More than fifty years ago, some fifty States met in San Francisco to draw up the blueprint for the management of the future relations between States. Acting under the influence of the long and bloody conflict that was just coming to an end – a conflict which had left no doubt about the enormous capacity of States for oppressing, torturing and killing large numbers of individuals – the States present at San Francisco radically departed from the past by granting to the new institution certain powers and duties relating to human rights. Prior to the Second World War, there had been virtually no international standards that States were required to respect or observe in dealing with their own people, a void that was made painfully obvious by the Holocaust and other acts of mass brutality and death. Because the term ‘human rights’ basically describes and relates to the relationship between a State or its government and its own people, a relationship that is second to none in being ‘domestic’, the States at San Francisco were ploughing the deepest of all possible inroads into the affairs of sovereign States.

The scourge of illegitimate governance in its many forms is, and always has been, globally endemic, constituting, in a contemporary sense, the single most important impoverishing and destabilising element in our ‘global neighbourhood’. If, in the view of nations, the major mandates of the law and common institutions of nations, as expressed in the Charter of the United Nations, are to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, to maintain international peace and security, and to be a centre for the harmonisation of the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends, then it is pertinent that international legal scholarship cast and maintain its powerful gaze upon this intensely pernicious phenomenon. It is also important that such scholarly enterprise be directed at the elucidation of the existing international regulatory framework for the control and perhaps elimination of such conduct; as well as at the construction of such a paradigm where none already exists.

During the last decade Dutch tort law has developed at such a monumental rate, that an overview might benefit readers that practice the law in other legal systems. These developments are not confined to the numerous judgments of the courts, but have resulted jointly from these decisions and from the activities of the legislature, i.e., (the judicial committees of) the Houses of Parliament conjointly with the Special Section for the New Civil Code of the Department of Justice. The work to renew the BW,1 commenced in 1947, involved a fundamental rethinking of the law of torts to be enacted in Book 6. This resulted in the publication of a proposal for Book 6, published in 1961, followed by a government draft bill in 1976. This draft bill was extensively discussed in the legal journals and it was later modified by a later draft bill. In all, it took Parliament some 15 years to finally amend and enact these drafts, together with those of Books 3, 5 and 7 (in part), and they finally entered into force in 1992.