Three decades ago, international criminal law might charitably have been referred to as a niche interest area within the discipline of public international law. There were no academic journals dedicated to the subject. Only a handful of monographs and doctoral theses addressed issues of relevance. The subject matter did not normally figure on university curricula. If a course in the field were offered, it would have been viewed as the idiosyncrasy of a lecturer, an offering to satisfy some private obsession rather than a genuine demand from students. The situation has been completely transformed. Today, several academic journals focus almost exclusively on the subject, and books are released at a prodigious rate. Special post-graduate degrees are offered in the field and hundreds of doctoral students, in universities around the world, toil in research libraries and archives. Moreover, newspapers and television feature stories related to international criminal justice activities almost daily. Few areas in international law, or for that matter in law in general, have ever developed at such a pace.

The birthdate of this exciting project might be fixed in December 1981, when the United Nations General Assembly invited the International Law Commission to resume work on the Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind, a matter that had been virtually moribund since 1954. The Commission produced its initial report in 1983 and then subsequently delivered annual reports, politely appealing to the General Assembly to complete its vision by contemplating the establishment of an International Criminal Court. In the early 1980s, nobody could have imagined that within a decade there would be two ad hoc international criminal tribunals and that within two decades a permanent International Criminal Court would be fully operational.

Actually, the history really begins seventy years earlier with the declaration by the British, French and Russian governments of their intent to prosecute those responsible for ‘these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilisation’, the atrocities that today we call the genocide of the Armenians. The Treaty of Sèvres of July 1920 authorised prosecutions and reserved the right for these to take place before an international court ‘[i]n the event of the League of Nations having created in sufficient time a tribunal competent to deal with the said massacres’. Although the proposed trials did not take place, it was clear that important changes in international law were afoot.