In the aftermath of the international war crimes trials before the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals in 1946, the international community began to direct its energies toward the establishment of a permanent international criminal court (ICC). In 1948 the United Nations (UN) General Assembly requested the UN International Law Commission to study the feasibility of establishing a permanent war crimes tribunal. The International Law Commission submitted a draft statute for such a court in 1953, but the project was shelved during the Cold War because of U.S. and Soviet suspicions that the existence of such a court might imperil their national security policies.

With the creation of the ad hoc Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals by the UN Security Council in the early 1990s, there was a growing consensus that similar international justice mechanisms should be employed on a case-by-case basis to prosecute crimes against humanity elsewhere...