The “road to Rome” was a long and often contentious one. The history of the establishment of the International Criminal Court spans over more than a century. While efforts to create a global criminal court can be traced back to the early 19th century, the story began in earnest in 1872 with Gustav Moynier – one of the founders of the International Committee of the Red Cross – who proposed a permanent court in response to the crimes of the Franco-Prussian War. The next serious call for an internationalized system of justice came from the drafters of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, who envisaged an ad hoc international court to try the Kaiser and German war criminals of World War I. Following World War II, the Allies set up the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals to try Axis war criminals.

After the end of World War II and the total collapse of the German Reich, the trial of the main war criminals started in the Nuremberg palace of justice, on November 20, 1945. 21 prominent National Socialists were tried, one was tried in absentia. The trial lasted for 10 months; 240 witnesses were heard and 16,000 pages of protocol taken down. The verdicts were returned on September 30, and October 1, 1946: twelve death sentences, three life and four long-term prison sentences, as well as four acquittals. Following the main trial, twelve follow-up trials were held between 1946 and 1949, when the American prosecution indicted 188 high-ranking representatives of the Nazi regime. The trials of the International Military Tribunal were a milestone in international jurisdiction and made Nuremberg a symbol for the rigorous prosecution of war crimes.

Since Nuremberg, such crimes and massive human rights violations have been committed in many other armed conflicts. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2 million people during the 1970s. Thousands of civilians, including horrifying numbers of unarmed women and children, lost their lives in armed conflicts in Mozambique, Liberia, El Salvador and other countries. However, international agreement to establish international courts to deal with such atrocities could not be reached until the 1990s, when the conflict in the former Yugoslavia erupted and war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide – in the guise of “ethnic cleansing” – once again commanded international attention. In 1993, the United Nations Security Council established the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and appointed Louise Arbour as its Chief Prosecutor, to prosecute and punish individuals for those systematic and massive human rights violations. Similarly, following the end of the civil war that raged in Rwanda from April to July 1994, in which some 1 million unarmed civilians were massacred, the Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

History has shown that without the enforcement mechanism of an international criminal court to deal with individual responsibility, acts of genocide and egregious human rights violations often go unpunished. Such a court could provide a complementary means by which to ensure that individuals can be prosecuted for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity when the country in which such crimes are perpetrated is unable or unwilling to prosecute. Also, such an institution could deter grave crimes under international law from being perpetrated in future. Accordingly, in 1998 government representatives met at a diplomatic conference in Rome to formulate a statute for a permanent international criminal court. On 17 July 1998, the Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted: 120 Governments voted in favour, 7 against and 21 abstained. The Statute entered into force in July 2002, having been ratified by at least 60 States, and the International Criminal Court has now been set up in The Hague (Netherlands).

The International Criminal Court is one of the six United Nations human rights courts and tribunals. The five others are:

• The International Court of Justice
• The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea
• The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
• The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
• The United Nations Administrative Tribunal.

The United Nations human rights activities are under the responsibilies of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Louise Arbour is currently the High Commissioner for Human Rights since 2004.