On 17 July 1998, at the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, 120 States voted to adopt the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This complex and detailed international treaty provides for the creation of an international criminal court with power to try and punish the most serious violations of human rights in cases when national justice systems fail at the task. It was a benchmark in the progressive development of international human rights, something whose beginning dates back fifty years, to the adoption on 10 December 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the third session of the United Nations General Assembly. The previous day, on 9 December, the Assembly had adopted a resolution mandating the International Law Commission to begin work on the draft statute of an international criminal court.

Establishing the international criminal court took considerably longer than many had hoped. In the early years of the Cold War, in 1954, the General Assembly essentially suspended work on the project. It did not resume until 1989. The end of the Cold War gave the idea of a court the breathing space it needed. The turmoil created in the former Yugoslavia provided the laboratory for international justice that propelled the agenda forward. The final version of the Rome Statute is not without serious flaws, and yet it ‘could well be the most important institutional innovation since the founding of the United Nations’. The institution itself will come into being when sixty States have ratified the Statute.