INTRODUCTION

International law is essentially the product of State interests. Even in this era of ­globalization, it remains under the long shadow of the Westphalian paradigm founded on State sovereignty. Progress, however, has been achieved as States' interests and the values that their societies embrace have converged, demanding greater conformity by States to certain human aspirations. Spurred by economic globalization, States' international cooperation has increased substantially. In some areas, it has given rise to collective decision-making processes. Among developments in which State sovereignty has given way to collective interests and values are those that occurred in the field of human rights and International Criminal Law (ICL). Both fields have been driven by ideas that with time have acquired an incrementally higher level of value recognition from broader and diverse constituencies. Admittedly, progress in these fields has been slower and more painstaking than in the economic field. What has been achieved in the fields of human rights and ICL is the result of a process of accretion that strengthened ideas about human values throughout the history of several civilizations.

History records that such accretion is the result of an evolutionary process. It begins with the emergence of an idea that then grows in its acceptance by different constituencies, and is then followed by a stage of prescriptive articulation that eventually leads to the stage of proscriptive normative formulation. Finally, it ripens into the establishment of enforcement mechanisms.