The history of the International Criminal Court dates back to the end of the First World War when in the Peace Treaty of Versailles An attempt was made to promote the creation of a criminal court to try Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, which was not fulfilled. Later, after the Second World War, the victorious powers decided to establish an international criminal court to try those responsible for the holocaust in the well-known Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, just as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to prosecute and prosecute those responsible for war crimes in Japan.
Both courts had the characteristic of being provisional. In the 1990s, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and International Criminal Tribunal for RwandaHowever, both were also ad-hoc, which is why the need arises in the international community for a permanent Criminal Court to exist to prosecute well-defined international crimes, therefore at the Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries of the United Nations held in Rome In 1998, the International Criminal Court was approved, the first permanent court to prosecute international crimes established in the same constitutive Treaty known as Rome Statute.
Among the motivations of the Rome Statute to highlight are:
“Recalling that it is the duty of every State to exercise its criminal jurisdiction against those responsible for international crimes,
Reaffirming the Purposes and Principles of the Charter of the United Nations and, in particular, that the States will refrain from resorting to the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State or in any other incompatible way for the purposes of the United Nations,
Emphasizing, in this context, that nothing in the present Statute shall be understood to authorize a State Party to intervene in a situation of armed conflict or in the internal affairs of another State,
Determined, for the purposes of achieving these ends and in the interest of present and future generations, to establish an International Criminal Court of a permanent nature, independent and linked to the United Nations system that has jurisdiction over the most serious crimes of significance for the international community as a whole,
Emphasizing that the International Criminal Court established by virtue of this Statute
will be complementary to national criminal jurisdictions »
Similarly, article 1 of the statute provides the following:
“An International Criminal Court (“ the Court ”) is hereby established. The Court will be a permanent institution, it will be empowered to exercise its jurisdiction over persons with respect to the most serious crimes of international importance in accordance with this Statute and will have a complementary character to national criminal jurisdictions. The jurisdiction and operation of the Court shall be governed by the provisions of this Statute. "
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